Their new COSMIC desktop is generating a tonne of buzz. It may spill over to the distro in general.
I am not a PopOS user but, watching the evolution of COSMIC, System76 seems very user focussed and makes sensible decisions. That bodes well for the overall OS.
I will not debate your thoughts on Arch though I personally have more problems on other distros. What I will say is that the EndeavourOS forums are pretty friendly. EOS is Arch for non-elitists.
Microsoft Edge works great on Linux. It is my second browser after Firefox.
Does that stop the ads in the Windows UI? I would not have thought so.
System76, makers of Pop!_OS, are making an entirely new desktop environment called COSMIC. The new DE will come with a number of its own apps to replace the GNOME ones, including the App Store.
The new App Store just got an update which apparently addresses your speed concern: https://blog.system76.com/post/your-monthly-cosmic-fix
I mostly agree with your write-up here. That said, I do think that systemd does want to eliminate SUID. I also think they want to absorb most of the low level system plumbing.
It seems a fairly explicit goal of systemd to redefine Linux as a unified platform rather than as a kernel that can run any one of many implementations of many different services. I assume this is not just the systemd lead but also a goal of Red Hat.
Personally, while I am ok with systemd defining itself as a single source for all this functionality, I hate that they are taking away ( or making it hard at least ) to have independent implementations of these services.
What Chinera is doing with dinit and turnstile is really interesting. It would be nice to have feature comparable approaches to the systemd monolith that distributions could choose from.
As a die-hard Linux user, I understand that most of their devs probably used Macs. Sadly, they are likely not an outlier which means many ( most ) of their target customers are Mac users too.
Overall, I applaud their focus and platform native approach. Let’s hope we get a decent Linux editor out of it at some point.
Well, given the current state of the Open Source driver, I think it is a bad idea.
Although, I guess if you can tolerate closed source….
Well, there is actually. You just have to be knowledgable enough to use it. What I am unclear on is why so many die hard “no non-free firmware” advocates have hardware that requires non-free firmware.
I am assuming the problem is that people have hardware that will cause non-free firmware to be downloaded and installed against their wishes. Because, if they do not own such hardware, no non-free firmware will be installed and therefore I do not see a problem. Unless of course what bothers people is that others are able to easily install a working system. I would not want to accuse anybody of such bad behaviour.
Insisting on worse experiences on others to further your own politics is not politics I personally support.
You know what probably pisses other people off? Finally deciding to install Debian and then finding that it does not run on their hardware.
I really applaud that Alma rose above all the Red Hat drama and that they now have a true community distribution. Instead of creating a bunch of dishonest noise, they improved their project. Bravo.
They still state that they are binary compatible with RHEL. They still say they target exactly the same behaviour as RHEL and that any deviation will be considered a bug. They are proving you do not have to be a parasite to be a competitor or even a drop-in replacement. Again, bravo.
They also have the freedom now to fix their own bugs if they choose. I would certainly trust their expertise over somebody that only knows how to compile SRPMS.
I really hope that “the community” sees the differentiation Alma now offers from something like Rocky and that Alma will be rewarded with commercial success. They deserve it.
I cannot answer your question obviously but there are several “primary” distros.
Debian, Fedora, Arch, Void, Alpine, Chimera, RHEL, SUSE, Gentoo, and others are all built from scratch. You do not have to use SystemV. The closest to that is probably Slackware I guess.
PopOS is based on Ubuntu which is itself based on Debian.