03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 0c)
Lately I've been using Mint-XFCE in a VM for some of my Linux needs and that's been much better performing than trying to virtualize the fancier desktop environments. But Pop_OS looks promising for next time I need a native linux environment.
And they also break on every GNOME release, often enough that I kinda' gave up on my favorite GNOME extension (Dash to Dock). Not that I blame the extension developers, but e.g. the review times on extensions.gnome.org are atrocious, and the build system is fiddly enough that I can't remember what I did to install it manually 6, 12 or 18 months earlier.
To configure your newly enabled extensions, you need to install the Gnome Extensions flatpack.
And to do that, you're off to the command line to add Flathub as a remote repo.
I don't know that the desktop icons extension requires any configuration, but based on the fact that you need an extension for it I'm guessing that there are similarly weird decisions being made elsewhere, and being able to change extension settings is going to be useful. And to get to that point you have a four stage install including a trip to the command line?
Why not ship Gnome Extensions by default with the OS? Is this like Steve Jobs with his "you're holding it wrong" remark, and people who want to put icons on the desktop are supposed to just stop wanting to do that?
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/gnome-shell-inte...
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gnome-shell-integr...
> You MUST install native connector for this extension to work.
I think the GNOME developers want to stop hearing about packaging issues for their apps, so they ask everyone to use the Flatpak versions. I have nothing against it, but there's no point as long as the distro-provided version still works.
It most certainly works out of the box for most general tasks.
Of course there are still limitations like a lack of some software (Photoshop...) and peripherals support, but these are becoming far more uncommon. I even find with Steam's proton implementation I can install and run most Windows games without a second thought.
Which begs the question why bother with Linux then.
As for privacy and control discussion, when most GNU/Linux users happen to mostly consume Electron and Web Apps, install applications via curl | sudo sh, there is hardly anything to discuss, other than cargo cult of a false sense of privacy and control.
Pity that all that security goes away the second an Electron app or Chrome is made use of.
You're making silly arguments based on your own strawmen.
But really, reality is that Linux support for games is still caught in the cycle of too few customers to bother -> customers want better Linux support before moving over -> too few customers to bother...
So I can now have all the (my) benefits of Linux and enjoy gaming that otherwise I wouldn't.
Also, you used "begs the question" incorrectly. You mean "raises the question".
Also, because Windows is a steaming pile of donkey turd that shoves ads in your OS, reboots when you're trying to get work done, resets privacy and power management settings after many of its coerced updates, and has a spazzy and inconsistent UI that offers limited customization. Also closed source.
Debian has been really good for just about everything since I moved to it many moons ago, and as of today is still my daily driver on all machines, but sometimes requires constant fiddling here and there, and I'm getting old; I stopped recompiling my kernels on PCs over 10 years ago, and a system that works just out of the box is too temping:) Not to criticize Debian, which has been great almost everywhere, but it gave some problems with some niche applications, for example music: a working LinVST installation is not easy to obtain, and it is tightly tied with the running kernel, which if has _rt extensions will help with low latency but sometimes doesn't let one compile with standard Wine libraries, and when one finds a good compromise, bang! VirtualBox stops working because now its kernel module doesn't build anymore. Grrrr!:) So I may take the chance to test some other options, and Arch might be a good candidate.
But of the ones above you mention that I’ve used in anger you’re absolutely right and that’s the very idea of them. To ‘just work’.
I prefer Tumbleweed though. Well tested rolling release (https://openbuildservice.org/), snapshots on update. With the opi package you can install: chrome, codecs, dotnet, msedge, msteams, plex, skype, signal, slack, teamviewer, vivaldi, vscode, vscodium, zoom and more. Brave is app i am missing so far, but having the newest version KDE and other software that required a PPA on Ubuntu is pretty nice.
And it feels much snappier installed on a SATA SSD than Mint from a NVME SSD on the same machine!
[edit: more info]
Same with a kernel greater >= 5.10 and that particular driver series. So would be nice to hear what Pop OS is doing here that Ubuntu isn’t.
If the rumours of nvidia open sourcing their drivers are true (sorry no link - just something I heard) they’ll all work out of the box one day (hopefully !).
This is really quite disingenuous, especially coupled with the jab at Nvidia cards. In case you weren't aware, there is no option to actually make an Nvidia card useful because of their locking up of P-state modifications and re-clocking behind cryptographically signed firmware they refuse to distribute. I think you actually know this though, otherwise why would you bring up the crippled nature of Nvidia cards of post-Maxwell and later?
PopOS definitely deserves accolades, but let's not pass off Nvidia's giving the middle finger proctological exam to the FOSS community as a point that makes PopOS better. Nothing is made better by that but Nvidia's bottom line, and vendor lock-in agenda.
EDIT: I think I misunderstood, and your complaint wasn't about the quality of their proprietary drivers, rather their refusal to work with open source developers. I was reacting mainly to "no option to actually make an Nvidia card useful"
I also had to resort to looking at guides on Medium.com for installing CUDA, as the install is not as straightforward as it looks. Alternatively, you can search on DuckDuckGo (for privacy reasons) with this as the query: "NVIDIA" AND "CUDA" AND "install" site:medium.com
In the end though I’m not going to use nouveau and am one hundred percent going to install the proprietary blobs Nvidia provides because I bought a dedicated GPU for a reason. Making it so I don’t have to jump through hoops to do that is appreciated and PopOS is one of the few that will just let me skip several steps to get there.
That seems like a kind of self-contradictory philosophy - if you care more about whether it "just works" than how much control you have, how does it make sense to want to run Linux at all?
Personally, I don't want to be part of Microsoft's ecosystem anymore, but I want some 'convenience' because I actually need to be productive rather than forever navigating the maze of compatible driver versions, so there are a number Linux flavours that fit this middle ground quite nicely.
I use Pop_OS in preference to Ubuntu, but Ubuntu for the most convenience short of anything Microsoft.
And I dare say that on servers, linux certainly "just works".
The answer to this is "For almost its entire history of being used as a desktop operating system by users without a significantly above average level of technical knowledge."
I think Linux is in a pretty good state for at least the last few years but you have to be either unreasonably lucky or simply joking to be able to pretend you are unfamiliar with the concept of running into various hardware/driver/software issues attempting to run Linux as a desktop OS. Even if you stick to "Linux Certified" hardware like Thinkpads.
Linux is my OS of choice these days, but over the years I've had 10x as many issues as I have with my Windows systems and I probably have 10x as much time in raw hours using Windows.
I think perhaps something happens to those of us with experience and expertise is when we run into an issue we might know how to fix it in 30 seconds or a few minutes so it doesn't even seem like it was an issue to us, simply part of configuring the system. However, when it happens to someone that's not experienced that same "non-issue" might result in them spending 4 hours on forums and various websites trying to figure out how to do something that would only take a few seconds if they already knew how.
That's assuming they don't just throw their hands up immediately and ask someone to fix it for them.
1. Hibernation is broken in three different ways (1. it's disabled by default 2. it resumes instantly when certain hardware is plugged in 3. it only works if almost no programs run, probably because the default swap partition is too small)
2. Computer freezes when running out of memory. Still not sure how to improve this, perhaps a bigger swap partition, perhaps changing the OOM killer configuration or installing another OOM killer daemon.
3. Ran out of space on the boot partition so kernel updates won't work until I figure out how to manually fix that. Plus the last kernel it installed before complaining doesn't boot at all, so I have to manually pick an old one.
And my earlier attempts on other distributions didn't go better either. Fedora managed to corrupt its package manager state and started complaining about incorrectly signed packages. And on Ubuntu I didn't manage to switch to nvidia's driver, it kept using nouveau with no indication of what's wrong.
I suspect most people, even those that are heavily invested in FOSS have some limit to that as well. I doubt that many people are auditing the code for every application or program they compile on their computer. They have a sphere of trust where they can just assume that what they're running is safe enough and that the software isn't going out of its way to be malicious. It's a matter of degrees. I happen to be okay with giving up some control for the convenience of not having to try to install wifi drivers on my computer without access to the internet.
I don't think it's self-contradictory at all. People have different ideas of what an Operating System should be and that's reflected in the number of different linux distributions all with their own ideas and philosophies. I just happen to really like what System76 has done.
I think the OP meant in terms of if you don't want the same non OSS binaries nVidia ships you can install something else?
I also think that the enhancements they've made with their Cosmic Desktop are indeed that - enhancements over base Gnome desktop, and they, as with most of the things have done, gone with a pragmatic approach to them. The automatic tiling is built on top of gnome rather than requiring a separate window manager (this is a much bigger feature than I think it's been given credit for). Workspaces are more prominent and there are more ways to make working with them better than on default Gnome. The launcher is also much more robust and more closely mimics spotlight search or Alfred rather than Launchpad.
I'm glad that PopOS exists and I would probably recommend it to anyone who wants to get their feet wet with linux and anyone that is curious about automatic tiling window managers - this is a great starting point with low commitment requirements.