Wholeheartedly agree. Debian has won the distro wars in my opinion. Their massive effort in safety and not breaking things means I can use stable as a "it just works" tool and focus on my actual work/fun.
Been playing around with Fedora Silverblue/Kinoite though, and watching bugs get fixed instead of working around them is surprisingly refreshing.
If not, run apt-get build dep vlc, apt-src the package, make the changes and debuild it.
macOS is close too, but there’s a couple of painful points. Some basic windows management (solved by rectangle), iCloud doing too many things, and too much locking down for “security”.
It also doesn't have a reliable backup system included (rsync is not reliable; backups should use snapshots) and you can't roll back system updates if something breaks (which will happen). Bluetooth, audio and suspend/resume still don't work consistently.
Linux isn't all bad but if you expect things to Just Work you'll be sorely disappointed.
You can create a distro that do all these things well. But that would require coordination across the board and result in something close to Android or Chromebooks.
> Bluetooth, audio and suspend/resume still don't work consistently.
That's a hardware problem. Most manufactures don't bother building drivers for linux or releasing the specifications for their devices.
You can't do rally without knowledge in cars. Linux for the most part is raw computing so having some computer knowledge is a necessity.
• The tiling is clunky, and underneath it's still GNOME, my #1 most hated Linux desktop.
• systemd-boot is clunky, does not play well with others, does not dual boot well at all, and it needs a huge ESP yet does not supply tooling to resize the ESP -- and Gparted can't resize FAT32 partitions as small as the typical ESP.
• It replaces Snap with Flatpak, which is not an improvement in any meaningful way: the only advocates who bleat that it's more open don't understand what the word means, and architecturally, OStree is a Lovecraftian horror.
• The installer is poor and could not handle using an existing `/home` partition when I first tried it (although that did get fixed). It is co-developed with Elementary, which is remarkable because the Elementary one worked better. They'd be better off learning what openness really means and working with Calamares instead.
• In summary, it shows many of the defects you'd expect from a distro designed by a hardware manufacturer: poor installation, poor handling of dual boot, poor handling of existing partitions, and poor handling of being put on an existing machine, especially an older one.
I find its advocates don't dual boot, don't use older kit, don't do complex partitioning, and so don't notice its defects and are unmoved because the problems do not affect them.
Gracefully handling interop and existing tech is one of the things Linux does best, far better than the BSDs for instance, and it is exactly where Pop OS falls down.
I rsync my home directory, at least the subdirectories that matter to me, to my NAS and have scripts to do the inverse on a new config. A lot of what is important to me is either in my Dropbox directory, or in git(hub|lab) repositories. I don't have much else that concerns me generally on my local system.
I appreciate what Pop has done above/beyond Gnome, and looking forward to Cosmos, even if it may be a while.
> I appreciate what Pop has done above/beyond Gnome
As it happens, as far as GNOME goes, I agree with you!
I like GUIs. I like WIMPs. I am adept at managing my own windows, apps, and files, thanks. I like a desktop that makes it easy for me to manage it as I wish.
GNOME is not. GNOME is a desktop inspired by smartphones and tablets, and it hides window management and app switching as much as possible. No buttons for minimise/maximise. No visual list of windows or apps, unless summoned with a keystroke or a mysterious ambiguous keyword ("Activities") now replaced with an inscrutable symbol.
GNOME is a desktop for people who don't manage windows and who live in a few maximised ones all the time. I do not, so I don't want that.
Pop tries to take that and turn it into a tiling environment, with smart automatic window placement. I don't want that -- I know where I want my windows, thanks -- but I appreciate that they tried and I think as a result it's better than GNOME which tries to make the whole issue go away.
But I tried it, and I wouldn't use it from choice.
What makes you say this?
Git is a Lovecraftian horror.
QED.
I mean, this is the stuff of jokes:
Or
https://x.com/agnoster/status/44636629423497217
"git gets easier once you get the basic idea that branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space."