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Comment by nwah1 | Hacker News Reader

I admire the efforts to get coreboot support, and love their open hardware initiatives, but I don't understand why everyone has NIH syndrome.

There was no need for them to create their own distro. That is a huge expense just to reinvent a wheel that has already been reinvented ten thousand times. And in the end most of their users will probably just load up the one they use already.

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I ended up having the opposite experience; I went and installed Pop on my non-System76 workstation.

It is basically just Ubuntu, with a custom desktop environment (that is actually perfectly fine although optional), but more importantly, ppas for up-to-date NVIDIA drivers and CUDA.

It's sort of like if a machine learning person installed Ubuntu on their workstation, did all the configuration work to get it working with their GPUs, and then turned that into a distro.

Also it has a bunch of common desktop shortcuts installed and canonical metrics all disabled...and disk encryption.

I don't think it's unusual that a hardware vendor would want to provide an OS that is absolutely guaranteed to work on the hardware they're selling--that's just protecting your customers. Ideally it shouldn't even be necessary if all of your components have well-supported drivers, but this is Linux we're talking about--only three years ago I had to replace the default wireless card in my Dell XPS 13 because the broadcom one was flaky as hell in Linux.

As good FOSS citizens, they would be encouraged to try to upstream all of their tweaks to GNOME or Ubuntu instead, but that's no guarantee that the changes would actually be accepted. Isn't that how Unity started in the first place?

They could have gotten Ubuntu certified on their computers like Dell does, although they'd probably have to pay Canonical.

Reinvent? https://pop.system76.com/docs/difference-between-pop-ubuntu/

It's a few add-ons to Ubuntu.

The page you linked says it’s more than a “few add-ons:”

> To call it a re-skinned Ubuntu brushes over all of the features and quality-of-life improvements that Pop! developers work diligently to create.

To be fair, developing "a few add-ons" requires considerably more time & effort than a simple reskin.

It is to make the best product they can and avoid pitfalls of supporting millions of existing distros. If you had put in a lot of effort in making the hardware, would you just say to your buyer: "just download and install any linux os" and deal with the endless user problems that will, as a rule, appear? No, you provide the best system you can so everything works as smoothly as possible so the users are happy and do not call support or (god forbid) return the goods.

It's marketing speak. They hardly have their own distribution on a technical level. System76 can use this to prevent any non-developer UI mistakes like material design getting into the mix from upstream.

Have you used it, out of interest? It's very slick, at the very least..

Configuring Linux userland's components to work together in a way that isn't garbage for what you're trying to do is an absurdly complicated task, that's why there are so many Linux distros: maintaining a distro is pretty much the only way to avoid doing all that work over and over again. It's a significant flaw in the Linux ecosystem.

I was thinking the same thing. I wish they focused their efforts on making good hardware.

The risk is that some features like power management will only work well with their OS and not other distros.

Welcome to linux

> but I don't understand why everyone has NIH syndrome.

Many free/open-source advocates have been complaining about NIH syndrome for years and years and years... to no avail.

Consider, for example, the situation with window managers and desktop environments. Off the top of my head, we have Gnome, KDE, Unity, XFCE, Openbox, dwm, Gala, KWin, Fluxbox, Enlightenment, JWM, and Ratpoison -- to name only 12 of the remarkably large number available for Linux. I suspect there are well over 100 window managers/desktop environments for Linux actively used in the wild today. And that's just window managers/desktop environments.

The number of people who have complained over the decades about this proliferation is... quite large. The number of words that have been written and spoken in waste, and the number of flame wars that have raged on, over which particular choice is best is also... remarkably large. Search for "Gnome versus KDE" or "Unity versus Gnome" if you want to see some examples.

I've come to accept this is The Way of free/open-source software.

On the flip side, some people love all this variety and choice.

I actually enjoy having choices. That's part of why systemd's feature creep to swallow everything bothers me. It represents choice being taken away from the administrator of the system.

Thanks. I made a note about the fact that many people -- including me, in fact -- like having variety and choices.

I am often reminded that there are multiple personality types showing up in many things, such as software.

To my personality type, I would wonder why you wouldn't want a replaceable window manager, and I consider a reaction like yours to be the product of some kind of odd software design authoritarianism.

But we're not both right or both wrong, this is just a point where we differ.

PS: a bunch of those desktop environments you cite are not actually window managers.

Thanks. Corrected!

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