The Anti-POP Bacon Email from  CodeMonkeyMike

Hey guys, long time listener and supporter of the entire Jupiter colony of shows with the old, boring USD stuff!

As a developer and full time Linux user for years, I've been very excited and interested in this new HP / System76 joint venture.  I know everyone is so shocked they chose Pop as the OS, and I know Mike has some crispy bacon on the subject, but I'm not sure it's even that complicated.

If not Pop, then what distro?  Vanilla Ubuntu has really fallen out of popular favor and is the old boring distro.  Not only that, Canonical has a very mixed reputation in the Linux community these days.  I recently purchased a Dell Precision with Ubuntu and wiped it to put Pop on the first boot.  In fact, I haven't used Ubuntu proper as a dev machine in years.  And I can't think of anyone who has.

You might say, why not Fedora?  I'm a fan of the Fedora project, but I'd hate to have to support new users with that.  Fedora out of the box is too bare and annoying to get set up, unless you're already a Linux geek.

What's REALLY left here?  Pop is based on Ubuntu for compatibility, but is a better out of the box experience without the drawbacks of snap vs flatpak, and cosmic is taylored to a developer's workflow.  Unlike Ubuntu or Fedora, System76 has first hand experience in running customer service for Pop users.  Not only that, System76 has massive street cred and a cult following that you cannot just "buy"

So if I were HP, I'd want to join up with System76 because it's just plain smart practically and marketing-wise.  Meanwhile, System76 gets some time in the mainstream spotlight, gets to upsell some launch keyboards and gets a bit more marketshare.... It's a win/win.

I think Egon would agree....