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Comment by ianlevesque | Hacker News Reader

Pop OS is great. You get Ubuntu but:

1. No snap packages! 2. Easy full disk encryption during install. 3. Optional tiling window manager right in gnome. 4. Nvidia drivers just work with no effort. 5. HiDpi displays just do the right thing with no effort.

I also use ZFS (non-root), which was just an 'apt install' away. This is also true on Ubuntu, but nice either way.

Only downside I've seen is that it's still X11. From what I read there were Wayland stability issues so they are giving that more time to bake.

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Why is X11 bad? Our precious few F/OSS desktop apps are written for it (or OpenGl) so you can at best expect those to still work. Conversely, there's at least the problem of screen sharing not working with Wayland, and moreover possible trouble with drivers for both new and old graphics hardware, and with developers needing to retest and qa older apps for Wayland. X11 might be old, but there are no new apps coming with the exception of Electron apps or other abstraction layers such as OpenGl/Vulcan/DirectX or whatever Steam is using or cross-platform IDEs (IDEA/Java Swing-based, Eclipse/SWT-based, etc.)

Screen sharing on Wayland works for me using pipewire [0]. Super happy with it.

[0] https://superuser.com/questions/1221333/screensharing-under-...

Just for another data point, I haven’t gotten Wayland screen sharing to work reliably at all. I tried it in Fedora 35 and Ubuntu 22, where Wayland is the default. On Fedora it just didn’t work, and on Ubuntu, Firefox would crash every time. On Chrome it sort of worked after some updates. For Slack you needed to launch from the terminal with special environment variables. There were also weird bugs around docking my laptop, requiring hard resets. All in all, for any sort of modern remote work it wasn’t usable. I switched back to X11 and it’s been smooth sailing. I do miss the fancy trackpad gestures.

Don't use distributions that are stuck with older versions of libraries that are under a ton of active development. Wayland on Ubuntu was okay for me, but running up-to-date Wayland and Pipewire libraries fixed the issues I was having with the distribution's Wayland support.

Have you used Wayland?

If you have an AMD graphics card it’s fairly trivial to switch Pop_OS over.

I found it to be very obviously a clear improvement in app start time and general snappiness in the OS. To extent that meaningfully improved the experience.

Apparently there are gaming benefits too, steamdeck has adopted it for this reason.

> Have you used Wayland?

Yes I have, with Ubuntu 22.04 and kubuntu 22.04. As a result, I've switched to Mac OS ;) Though not because of Wayland specifically but eg. libinput causing physical pain as opposed to the nonlinear/kinetic scroll synaptics had was definitely a contributing factor, along with other regressions making me want to throw my notebook out of the window.

X11 offers at least accessibility. The wayland team, to me, seems to be hyper-focused on reducing the duties of a GUI system to only providing basic interfaces. They didn't care about usability, accessibility and practicality, and they are currently (for the last few years) trying to pay this off.

Even more problematic is that X11 lacks user-noticeable deficiencies. Architecturally it has (partially severe) issues, but as an user, you don't notice. But if you're blind, need a screen reader, or want to use software enabling you to interact with the desktop environment outside of the classical, expected hardware (mouse, touchpad, screen), you're still out of luck. At least, screenshots mostly work now.

Yeah I know, probably unpopular opinion.

¹ https://wiki.gnome.org/Accessibility/Wayland (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25175894

Wayland still doesn't provide reasonable accessibility, and X11 lacks real problems at least from an user perspective (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35430864). I think it's quite a hard sell, wayland is architecturally better and more easy to developers, and to users, its more bug-prone, feature-lacking and less-supported than X11.

What is the downside of X11?

I ran Linux Mint with X11 and KDE for a few months and it was mostly pleasant. (There was an issue with brightness controls when using auto-switching hybrid graphics, but I don't know if that's an X11 vs Wayland issue.)

> Only downside I've seen is that it's still X11. From what I read there were Wayland stability issues so they are giving that more time to bake.

I believe their in house DE is going to be Wayland based. I'm personally very excited, it may finally be the DE to unify my Linux boxes away from i3/Sway/GNOME.

But no secure boot support.

Can you elaborate?

They’re not wrong. This is the code signing of your bootloader, kernel, etc that would prevent for example someone tampering with your boot partition to silently capture your encryption password the next time you type it in at boot. It’s a real threat but not one I’m concerned about. I have no idea if Pop OS not doing this is a regression from upstream Ubuntu or not.

Last time I tried, you had to disable UEFI secure boot to get PopOS to start. And then follow some complex steps to self sign all those components.

Regular Ubuntu (and Debian) does not need any of this.

The reason "secure boot" (yeah, scare quotes intended) is not the default for linux distributions:

> The boot loader and kernel must be signed with a trusted key recognized by the UEFI firmware. Microsoft maintains a widely trusted key for Secure Boot called the Microsoft UEFI Certificate Authority, and many Linux distributions use it to sign their boot loaders and kernels. This enables them to boot on systems with Secure Boot enabled by default.

Yeah this is the big one for me. I'm pretty convinced Secure Boot with a bring-your-own-key setup is the way. I understand Pop_OS doesn't want to invest the resources for this relatively niche market, but I'd love to switch if it allowed me to.

Why is not having snap packages good? You can just not use it if you don't like it?

Canonical has been substituting snap packages in for native packages on Ubuntu without letting end users know. If you know about it then you can disable snapd or only install through apt (as far as I know that still installs native packages), but it's still an opaque change to less technical users. You can still use snap packages on Pop_OS, but it's your choice to do so. On Ubuntu, it's a lot harder to "just not use it".

Yes this is the reason I included it as a plus. Ubuntu will silently install snaps for some 'apt install' invocations, which is obnoxious. For me specifically snaps tend to get font rendering wrong and I'm not interested in troubleshooting why.

> or only install through apt (as far as I know that still installs native packages)

`apt install chromium-browser` installs Chromium as a snap package. If you don't have snapd installed, it'll "helpfully" install it for you.

It's become a binary choice between snap and flatpak, with flatpak being preferred by all major Ubuntu forks (Pop OS, elementary OS, Linux Mint). I won't be shocked if years from now Ubuntu decides snap is no longer worth it, like they did with Mir and Unity.

Mint is flatpak based? Since when? (writing this from my Linux Mint OS).

Mint is not flatpak based but it has Flatpak pre-installed in case you want to install some flatpaks. It doesn't have Snap pre-installed.

Alternatively, the *ubuntus have Snap pre-installed and recently said they are removing Flatpak support, although I believe the user can install Flatpak if they want to use flatpaks.

On Ubuntu apt installs the snap version of an app if one exists. I spent some time trying to figure out a workaround that didn't break my system but couldn't and just admitted defeat.

Uninstalling snap removed every web browser available short of lynx and w3m. That was fun. Trying to add one back also adds snap back. Next install I'm ditching Ubuntu.

Thanks for the correction and explanation. I haven't used Ubuntu in years, so all of my knowledge of its issues comes second-hand and I don't want to spread FUD about things that aren't actually issues. Sounds like the problem is worse than I thought, which just solidifies my decision to stay away.

Not really. They run a root daemon, and browsers are moved there with no easy alternative. Makes them slower to start up. No way to keep the filesystem and mount table clean without surgery, multiple steps which will need to be repeated after every version upgrade.

If you can avoid all that by using Pop or Mint, why not?

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