Will Pop! OS continue to be based on Ubuntu?

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.

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@silentTeeeOPEnglish

6•9 months ago

See, this was my thought as well. Canonical seems to be going the way of RedHat, and I understand that they need to turn a profit, but my understanding is also that most of their money comes from server support. Not really sure how much they can squeeze out of Desktop users, but I guess that’s what snaps are for…