Just an anime nerd who also has a fascination with programming language design

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • So something I just thought of, and I’m surprised nobody brought up (well, I guess some did indirectly, it just wasn’t obvious to me): A major benefit of basing off of Ubuntu is more up-to-date hardware support. While it’s true that Debian now supports non-free firmware by default, that doesn’t mean that it will be recent.

    Debian support for hardware is truly impressive, but it ultimately lags behind because Debian prioritizes stability over new features. This is why routine Debian updates only cover severe bugs and security issues, and from what I can tell that also is the case for hardware support and the kernel.

    Ubuntu tries to keep in step with new hardware releases, which makes much more sense for power users like engineers, developers and gamers, all of which seem to be key consumers of System76 hardware. Basing off of Ubuntu makes it easier to satisfy that clientele. I imagine it also makes submitting upstream fixes for hardware-related packages easier.








  • So I kind of get this, but from what I can understand it’s more tedious from a DevOps perspective to switch package management systems than to just switch to repositories that target older software versions. Hence why I’m curious as to whether simply basing off of Debian-testing like Ubuntu does is the most likely outcome.

    As for NVIDIA support, I was playing around with the latest Debian release and almost immediately noticed that the NVIDIA proprietary packages were available by default. In other words, Debian seems to be just as inclined to support an NVIDIA setup as Ubuntu does out of the box now.