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.

  • @pastermil@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    11•10 months ago

    Interesting thread overall. Maybe I’d contribute my two cents

    Some considerations:

    • Linux Mint may make their debian-based as their main thing
    • CalVer might be better for a more general audience, according to LibreOffice project; SemVer, on the other hand, seems to work well, as shown with Fedora project
    • Ubuntu’s release cycle is very predictable, with their release every month 4 and month 10, LTS on every month 4 of even year; Debian’s isn’t as neat and predictable, but for the last couple decaded they’ve been making release every two years rather consistently, albeit the irregular months
    • Ubuntu may have the edge with their more up-to-date software for the regular release, but people may not care that much especially now we have Flatpak as the equalizer; as for the system package, Debian now has all the non-free drivers for nvidia and all their nonsense, along with the backport repo to enable if one really wants the more up-to-date software

    Would they rebase to Debian? At the moment we cannot tell. We can assume they’d stay with Ubuntu as a default, but we have nothing denying it can be otherwise.

    Would it be a huge undertaking? Most definitely. But we’ve seen System76 taking a bigger undertaking. Indeed rebasing system packages would be nothing compared to creating DE & system mainboard from scratch.

    It also helps that both Debian & Ubuntu use the same packaging system and follow the same package naming convention for most packages. This would cut down a lot of the time required for initial design & implementation, leaving them with testing & bugfix as their major parts.

    It would make sense to start by having it as alternative just like LMDE.

    Would they rebase to Fedora? I don’t think it would make as much sense, but we’ve seen something like this done. Still, I think they might as well create a whole new distro (or edition, since it would make sense to keep this name with a lot of publicity attached) if they’re to go this route.

    • @silentTeeeOPEnglish
      4•10 months ago

      Interesting two cents! Your line of reasoning is pretty thorough, and I think your educated guesses are fairly sounds! Thanks for contributing! I agree, while switching to Debian as a base would certainly be a lot of work, System76 has definitely gone above and beyond in far more complex ways, particularly with their COSMIC DE effort.

    • @cygnus@lemmy.caEnglish
      1•9 months ago

      Rebasing to Fedora would be extremely interesting, although I don’t see that happening. I think there would be a lot of affinity between Pop and Fedora thematically, as opposed to Debian which is ultra-conservative.