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.
So something I just thought of, and I’m surprised nobody brought up (well, I guess some did indirectly, it just wasn’t obvious to me): A major benefit of basing off of Ubuntu is more up-to-date hardware support. While it’s true that Debian now supports non-free firmware by default, that doesn’t mean that it will be recent.
Debian support for hardware is truly impressive, but it ultimately lags behind because Debian prioritizes stability over new features. This is why routine Debian updates only cover severe bugs and security issues, and from what I can tell that also is the case for hardware support and the kernel.
Ubuntu tries to keep in step with new hardware releases, which makes much more sense for power users like engineers, developers and gamers, all of which seem to be key consumers of System76 hardware. Basing off of Ubuntu makes it easier to satisfy that clientele. I imagine it also makes submitting upstream fixes for hardware-related packages easier.