Totally naive question, but is there any merit to Pop! OS continuing to be based on Ubuntu as opposed to Debian?

I ask because of the following developments that have happened over the past few years:

  • System76 is gunning to develop their own COSMIC DE not based on GNOME
  • Debian now officially supports non-free firmware in their ISO releases, meanwhile supporting this out of the box was kind of Ubuntu’s whole “raison d’etre” in the early days
  • Canonical is forcing snaps on everyone, and is making it progressively harder to remove them from the system without having very real impacts (I’m hearing whispers online about them “snapifying” CUPS printer drivers), and to get around this System76 basically has to repackage some software into .deb files by hand and offer flatpak integration as an alternative if people want newer stuff.

Essentially, the conclusion I am drawing from all this information is that it’s going to get harder and harder to base things off of Ubuntu moving forward, and that other than newer packages (which is solved with flatpaks) there’s actually not a whole lot of benefit to basing things off of Ubuntu as opposed to a slightly tweaked Debian flavor…

So with all that said, I’m curious what the community and developers behind Pop! OS think about my line of reasoning. Are there any considerations being made to potentially shift to Debian as a base? If not, are there things I’m not considering? Or (and this is totally out of left field), is System76 planning to become a company somewhat resembling Canonical and create their own distro based on the Debian testing branch?

Would love to hear some thoughts on this, and apologies if this has been brought up before.

  • @TeddEEnglish
    5•1 year ago

    I think Ubuntu is a for-profit company. I think System76 is a for-profit company. As a rule, companies tend to respect other companies in ways they don’t respect people.

    I think it’s more likely that System76 will rebase to Debian than Ubuntu kick them off, but if Ubuntu really starts pulling out the brass tacks, I don’t think System76 will show any loyalty.

    In other words, I think Ubuntu benefits from counting all the Pop!_OS users as part of the Ubuntu family (at least statistics wise), that they’d be killing a golden goose by trying to evict them, even though they’d obviously prefer them to use Snaps.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      This is an interesting perspective! So then by that logic, is there a possibility that Canonical will try and pressure System76 to officially switch to snaps over flatpaks?

      • @cybersandwichEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        Lol no way. How could they pressure them? Pop isn’t an official Ubuntu derivative like xubuntu,kubuntu, etc. Canonical only holds sway over those. Anyone else is just another distro.