I am curious if the fact that a lot people use pop os on hardware other than system76 hardware is detrimental or helpful towards the development of the OS and the workload of the devs. Like if the number of users of pop os on different hardware configs increases, is that helpful for the devs considering that it may increase the number of bugs and hence result in an increase in worload
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The workload is the same regardless of how many people are using Pop!_OS, or what hardware they’re using it on. It is not detrimental to the development of the OS for people to report hardware-specific issues. Nor does it necessarily matter how many bug reports there are. Outside of what’s necessary for System76 hardware, development time is not typically spent on resolving hardware-specific issue reports because we don’t have the means to do so. Most of the team works exclusively on Pop!_OS and COSMIC-specific features and issues.
For us to diagnose and fix hardware-specific issues, the QA and engineering teams need to have that hardware on hand to test and validate with. Given that our salaries depend entirely on System76 hardware sales, and the QA lab is in the same factory where systems are assembled, that’s the hardware that we provide the best first party support for. With each OS update regression-tested on the hardware we’ve sold in the past.
Sometimes the hardware support that we provide for our systems also fixes issues in hardware from other vendors. We’ve sold a lot of systems over the years with a wide range of hardware configurations. A lot of the components in our hardware are also widely used by other system vendors. Such as a particular Ethernet chip, or the latest NVIDIA graphics card. There’s a lot of regression tests that we use to test some advanced hardware features, and these might coincidentally resolve issues in other systems. As had happened when we worked on hybrid switchable graphics in system76-power for our hybrid graphics laptops.
For everything else though, the majority of the support for hardware-specific issues depends on community support, kernel/firmware updates, or even updates released upstream in certain packages by Ubuntu. Community members who have the same hardware might respond to an issue report with a workaround they found. We might respond to support requests with known solutions we’ve seen reported in the past. Sometimes the community finds a solution that can be generically applied to Pop!_OS.
The best way to get hardware-specific issues resolved is reporting them to the Linux kernel bug reporting mailing list. If a kernel maintainer or developer has that hardware on hand, and is able to write a patch for it which gets merged, then it’ll be included in a future kernel release. We regularly update the kernel in Pop!_OS, so we receive those fixes in bulk without any involvement necessary on our part — outside of packaging and releasing a new kernel.
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I am no expert, but it feels like it just requires the work of low-level softwares, like kernel, systemd, drivers. At the distro level (ignoring hardware focused distro like Asahi), it should be mostly hardware agnostic. This is why most linux distro supports all hardware.
Using these distro provides valuable diagnostic data (assume you turn it on) to make popos or linux in general better.
So I would think it is likely a relatively positive thing to use popos if you like them.
Nobody I know that uses popOS on a daily uses system 76 hardware. When I switched it was the same hardware I formerly ran windows on
popOS is generally very agnostic to the hardware
Can’t speak to whether it’s helpful for the system76 devs, but I use it on a dell xps and it’s awesome. Mostly just in it for the window manager though.
There are some tricky things to navigate hardware wise (fingerprint reader, etc.) but those type of things are compatibility issues across all distros. In my case, and often with other hardware, the manufacturer or the community does release drivers to support nix platform, but you may have to build from source. You know, typical linux stuff.
In general, I think it is a positive thing as it brings Pop!_OS to more users and thus increases the chances of gaining new contributions.
For instance, I run Pop on 4 non-System76 devices and because I enjoy the distribution so much, I’ve contributed a few fixes to the distribution. If Pop didn’t work well on most non-System76 hardware, I would not have used it nor would I have contributed to it.
Moreover, I actually do contribute financially to System76 by donating here: https://pop.system76.com/. You can provide a monthly donation directly to System76 for Pop if you wish.
Additionally, most (x86_64) hardware is not that different and a lot of bugs/issues occur at a layer above the actual hardware differences. For example, there was a bug in how bluetooth was handled during suspend and resume a year or so ago. This impacted both System76 machines and non-System76 machines and a few of the contributors to the eventual fix (including myself) helped debug and implement a fix despite not running System76 hardware.
Finally, because of how well Pop works and the interaction of the developers and the community I am more likely to purchase a System 76 device for my next machine (hoping the new Virgo is as amazing as the teasers have been hinting at).
