System76 patches APT for Pop!_OS to prevent users breaking their systems

You mean the one with the mouse showing in one place and clicking in another? Yes, I had that one too on AMD, I'm not even surprised when it shows up, "oh, that thing again".
As for workarounds, yes, I also use various scripts to force my monitors to do what I want depending on the specific task. But they are simple tasks, and all this xrandr brouhaha should not be needed. Nvidia/Amd/whatever, is a hassle enough that I'm just better with a single monitor.

If xrandr can fix your issue, then the problem is your DE, not the driver. The weird issue to mention on the second guy is the offset of the screen.

I haven't had that obvious offset issue recently, that's fair. But my main point is that there's no use to throw the dead cat in Nvidia's yard. These weird issues happens regardless if you run Nvidia or AMD.

You mean the one with the mouse showing in one place and clicking in another? Yes, I had that one too on AMD, I'm not even surprised when it shows up, "oh, that thing again".
As for workarounds, yes, I also use various scripts to force my monitors to do what I want depending on the specific task. But they are simple tasks, and all this xrandr brouhaha should not be needed. Nvidia/Amd/whatever, is a hassle enough that I'm just better with a single monitor.

If xrandr can fix your issue, then the problem is your DE, not the driver. The weird issue to mention on the second guy is the offset of the screen.

Which only happened on the live cd though and not after he installed and used the proper everything so probably a problem with nouveau or the DE used for the live cd.

I guess that's why you and me and most of us are never asked by friends, family and even close-to-strangers: "You know your stuff with computers, right?!? How can I ..."

Oh wait...

Correct. Do note that everyone you mentioned above are people who know you personally in another context, and as you mentioned "you know your stuff with computers, right?!? [...]" and not "as an expert, [...]". The second clue there is in the ", right?!?".

Sorry, it doesn't work out. I am an expert, and I am asked. A friend of mine once asked if I could fix the startup time of a colleague's computer, so it's not even restricted to people I know. And I'm sure many here have similar experiences. My favorite computer magazine even has articles that start with "... and when you're asked for help again as you're the one who knows their stuff with computers...".

If someone's available, many people ask for computer help.

It's easy to be disappointed by the first episode of this series and view it as a disaster.

I found it to be absolutely hilarious. I don't care about petty squabbles. No distro is perfect, linux is not perfect, but that is not why any of us use it. I also find it funny how the linux community as a whole seems to behave like a corporate PR department, thinking of this in terms of a PR disaster.
I for one am excited for the rest of this series. I had a blast watching the first one.

Yeah, from my point of view it was a cautious success, and left a nice supportive comment on the video (which I'm sure will be lost among the 7,000 others) to let them know there are those of us cheering them on in their attempt. It's easy to overlook with Linus's situation, but Luke gets Linux Mint installed, gets Steam installed, and runs a game with no issues. In the first episode. His experience was basically boring (seeing as how no one is really talking about it), which is really encouraging! Meanwhile Linus manages to bork his first choice within fifteen minutes, yes, but instead of giving up for the day (an action I wouldn't blame anyone for doing at that point) he gives it a second go and gets a second distro installed. Sure it's got a sound bug, but that's probably something he'll be able to fix after a good night's sleep and a few hours of Googling, and will probably be straightened out in the second episode.

The overall tone was quite levelheaded and even, with no one smugly proclaiming Windows' superiority or Linux's inferiority, and no one angrily swore off Linux for life. I suspect (or at least hope) that with the public challenge to keep them using Linux for a month, by forcing themselves to stick with it they'll get over the initial hump of difficulties everyone new to Linux encounters and get into the smooth sailing regions well before the time is up. I'm sure they'll probably try playing some AAA games that don't work or maybe some complicated streaming setup that fails or something, but on the whole I expect the overall experience to be pretty painless after the initial few days.

I just wish they would get out of their "nobody should ever have to use the terminal mindset. The terminal is perhaps the thing that I love the most about Linux...

Stephen Hawking said that, when he was writing A Brief History of Time, his publisher told him that for every equation he put in the book he would lose half his readership. He ended up including only a single equation, and the book became a phenomenal bestseller.

I suggest a corollary: every time you require use of the terminal, you lose half your potential user base. Let's face it, the majority of computer users are only barely comfortable handling a GUI in the first place. Requiring such people to use the terminal is like requiring people who are barely comfortable with arithmetic to solve non-linear partial differential equations. I absolutely agree that the terminal is one of the best parts of Linux, and people should be able to use it as much as they want; but I also believe that people having to use will probably see Linux's fraction of desktop usage never break a few percent. (This is where different distros come in; you can have a range of distros from "never need the terminal ever" to "doesn't have a window manager", and that's fine as people can self-sort according to their comfort level as long as there are beginner-friendly distros for them to start off with.) So I don't think that's an unreasonable point of view for a new-to-Linux user...

Incredible how much almost no one notices that Mint had almost no issues (aside from having to unplug the second monitor during installation. A problem common to Linux, and a solution which even non technical users can come up with). I guess Mint is not a big enough challenge to be noticed much anymore.. ;-)

It's easy to be disappointed by the first episode of this series and view it as a disaster.

I found it to be absolutely hilarious. I don't care about petty squabbles. No distro is perfect, linux is not perfect, but that is not why any of us use it. I also find it funny how the linux community as a whole seems to behave like a corporate PR department, thinking of this in terms of a PR disaster.
I for one am excited for the rest of this series. I had a blast watching the first one.

Yeah, from my point of view it was a cautious success, and left a nice supportive comment on the video (which I'm sure will be lost among the 7,000 others) to let them know there are those of us cheering them on in their attempt. It's easy to overlook with Linus's situation, but Luke gets Linux Mint installed, gets Steam installed, and runs a game with no issues. In the first episode. His experience was basically boring (seeing as how no one is really talking about it), which is really encouraging! Meanwhile Linus manages to bork his first choice within fifteen minutes, yes, but instead of giving up for the day (an action I wouldn't blame anyone for doing at that point) he gives it a second go and gets a second distro installed. Sure it's got a sound bug, but that's probably something he'll be able to fix after a good night's sleep and a few hours of Googling, and will probably be straightened out in the second episode.

The overall tone was quite levelheaded and even, with no one smugly proclaiming Windows' superiority or Linux's inferiority, and no one angrily swore off Linux for life. I suspect (or at least hope) that with the public challenge to keep them using Linux for a month, by forcing themselves to stick with it they'll get over the initial hump of difficulties everyone new to Linux encounters and get into the smooth sailing regions well before the time is up. I'm sure they'll probably try playing some AAA games that don't work or maybe some complicated streaming setup that fails or something, but on the whole I expect the overall experience to be pretty painless after the initial few days.

I just wish they would get out of their "nobody should ever have to use the terminal mindset. The terminal is perhaps the thing that I love the most about Linux...

Stephen Hawking said that, when he was writing A Brief History of Time, his publisher told him that for every equation he put in the book he would lose half his readership. He ended up including only a single equation, and the book became a phenomenal bestseller.

I suggest a corollary: every time you require use of the terminal, you lose half your potential user base. Let's face it, the majority of computer users are only barely comfortable handling a GUI in the first place. Requiring such people to use the terminal is like requiring people who are barely comfortable with arithmetic to solve non-linear partial differential equations. I absolutely agree that the terminal is one of the best parts of Linux, and people should be able to use it as much as they want; but I also believe that people having to use will probably see Linux's fraction of desktop usage never break a few percent. (This is where different distros come in; you can have a range of distros from "never need the terminal ever" to "doesn't have a window manager", and that's fine as people can self-sort according to their comfort level as long as there are beginner-friendly distros for them to start off with.) So I don't think that's an unreasonable point of view for a new-to-Linux user...

Incredible how much almost no one notices that Mint had almost no issues (aside from having to unplug the second monitor during installation. A problem common to Linux, and a solution which even non technical users can come up with). I guess Mint is not a big enough challenge to be noticed much anymore.. ;-)

Indeed. If one were a Mint chauvinist, one might argue that the moral of the whole episode is, if you're going to install Linux and you don't want hassles, use Mint.
Of course I'd have to admit the downside is, yes, you'll have a nice desktop, smooth, everything working, easy to adapt to . . . but it will not, without tinkering, have the most bleeding edge stuff to help you run the games that only just started working on Proton and such.

in fact he also had problems with Manjaro (no sound), his colleague had no problem with Linux Mint. Anyway, i'm not sure that this "challenge" has any real signification.

Well, maybe, but everything also went fine for his challenge buddy with Mint, which has neither newest kernels nor newest drivers. There are a lot of distros and I don't think it's valid to claim he "should" have chosen Manjaro.

I just remembered that he end up without sound in his Manjaro install. So no, not even Manjaro is error free (mainly with the weird setup he has in his home).

yeah but it's another thing breaking the system entirely by just installing Steam, and another one having no sound -due to possibly bleeding edge hardware- also who knows if his colleague has the same top-notch hardware and peripherals, I very much doubt it. As I said he should have taken a hint from Valve, and today news is that Valve recommends for now Manjaro KDE, because by Valve's words:

We’re going to be installing Manjaro, which is an Arch Linux distribution, similar to what’s on Steam Deck. This version comes with KDE Plasma, which is the same desktop environment that will ship on Steam Deck – all in all it’s very close to the Deck OS environment, and a great way to test for system support.

Almost there, just have to install Steam. One bonus of Manjaro is that Steam is pre-installed.

Last edited by sudoer on 12 November 2021 at 7:54 pm UTC

yeah but it's another thing breaking the system entirely by just installing Steam, and another one having no sound -due to possibly bleeding edge hardware- also who knows if his colleague has the same top-notch hardware and peripherals, I very much doubt it. As I said he should have taken a hint from Valve, and today news is that Valve recommends for now Manjaro KDE

Yes, for developers who are trying to emulate a Steam Deck so they can make their games work on it, because it will get them a system whose guts have a resemblance to SteamOS 3.0.
That doesn't make it recommended or uniquely recommendable for other Linux gaming use cases.

yeah but it's another thing breaking the system entirely by just installing Steam, and another one having no sound -due to possibly bleeding edge hardware- also who knows if his colleague has the same top-notch hardware and peripherals, I very much doubt it. As I said he should have taken a hint from Valve, and today news is that Valve recommends for now Manjaro KDE

Yes, for developers who are trying to emulate a Steam Deck so they can make their games work on it, because it will get them a system whose guts have a resemblance to SteamOS 3.0.
That doesn't make it recommended or uniquely recommendable for other Linux gaming use cases.

Gaming engines and technology are moving forward everyday and constantly evolving, which means libraries, APIs, GPU drivers, kernels are moving forward everyday as well to support the new software and hardware, so please go tell a Linus guy that he can't play his game because his old-ass distro you 've suggested for him does not support his new hardware, his new peripherals, the game's libraries are newer than those that he has in his system, his GPU drivers do not support the new shiny effects or are performing worse and that he has to wait some years for it or compile a new version by himself or probably destroy his OS in 10 minutes by mixing new and old libraries like in MX Linux, and nice things like that to scare him away. Valve is unquestionably the one and only leading force for Linux penetration amongst the new generation of gamers, and has wisely chosen Arch for all those reasons, transparency and simplicity (faster package-manager because it doesn't have to solve 1mil. dependencies and do 10mil checks, meaning an update wouldn't last 1 hour like in Mint for just unpacking a package), and is already advising Arch-based Manjaro to the devs, not Fedora or OpenSUSE TW, or Debian Sid... ,so you can expect new Linux users -because of Steam and the Steam Deck- going with the Arch-line and very probably staying with it, which means Manjaro will be their starting distro, then maybe they can start exploring EndeavourOS, going Garuda, SteamOS 3.0, or even later vanilla Arch. So it is actually the de facto recommendation and you can either accept it with the upcoming reality forged by Valve, or live in your own :)


Last edited by sudoer on 13 November 2021 at 12:30 am UTC

yeah but it's another thing breaking the system entirely by just installing Steam, and another one having no sound -due to possibly bleeding edge hardware- also who knows if his colleague has the same top-notch hardware and peripherals, I very much doubt it. As I said he should have taken a hint from Valve, and today news is that Valve recommends for now Manjaro KDE

Yes, for developers who are trying to emulate a Steam Deck so they can make their games work on it, because it will get them a system whose guts have a resemblance to SteamOS 3.0.
That doesn't make it recommended or uniquely recommendable for other Linux gaming use cases.

Gaming engines and technology are moving forward everyday and constantly evolving, which means libraries, APIs, GPU drivers, kernels are moving forward everyday as well to support the new software and hardware, so please go tell a Linus guy that he can't play his game because his old-ass distro you 've suggested for him does not support his new hardware, his new peripherals, the game's libraries are newer than those that he has in his system, his GPU drivers do not support the new shiny effects or are performing worse and that he has to wait some years for it or compile a new version by himself or probably destroy his OS in 10 minutes by mixing new and old libraries like in MX Linux, and nice things like that to scare him away. Valve is unquestionably the one and only leading force for Linux penetration amongst the new generation of gamers, and has wisely chosen Arch for all those reasons, transparency and simplicity (faster package-manager because it doesn't have to solve 1mil. dependencies and do 10mil checks, meaning an update wouldn't last 1 hour like in Mint for just unpacking a package), and is already advising Arch-based Manjaro to the devs, not Fedora or OpenSUSE TW, or Debian Sid... ,so you can expect new Linux users -because of Steam and the Steam Deck- going with the Arch-line and very probably staying with it, which means Manjaro will be their starting distro, then maybe they can start exploring EndeavourOS, going Garuda, SteamOS 3.0, or even later vanilla Arch. So it is actually the de facto recommendation and you can either accept it with the upcoming reality forged by Valve, or live in your own :)

I do not want to get into a distro flame war. And your attitude is such that I can't really keep discussing without getting into one. Good day.

I'm pretty bored of the narrative that if you're not running a rolling release, then you're outdated.

I'm on Pop, but I still have the latest kernels every day or so via xanmod. I have cutting edge Mesa via Kisak. It's a good mix.

Use the distro that works for you, but please, just please can we stop putting down other people's choices?

Look, I've tried Manjaro twice and it was a car crash both times, about two years apart. I don't spend my life telling everyone not to use it though, because it clearly does work for some people. That's great! I'll sing Pop's praises and the Arch bods can talk up Manjaro.

It's not hard. We're all running Linux here.

Gaming engines and technology are moving forward everyday and constantly evolving, which means libraries, APIs, GPU drivers, kernels are moving forward everyday as well to support the new software and hardware, so please go tell a Linus guy that he can't play his game because his old-ass distro you 've suggested for him does not support his new hardware, his new peripherals, the game's libraries are newer than those that he has in his system, his GPU drivers do not support the new shiny effects or are performing worse and that he has to wait some years for it or compile a new version by himself or probably destroy his OS in 10 minutes by mixing new and old libraries like in MX Linux, and nice things like that to scare him away. Valve is unquestionably the one and only leading force for Linux penetration amongst the new generation of gamers, and has wisely chosen Arch for all those reasons, transparency and simplicity (faster package-manager because it doesn't have to solve 1mil. dependencies and do 10mil checks, meaning an update wouldn't last 1 hour like in Mint for just unpacking a package), and is already advising Arch-based Manjaro to the devs, not Fedora or OpenSUSE TW, or Debian Sid... ,so you can expect new Linux users -because of Steam and the Steam Deck- going with the Arch-line and very probably staying with it, which means Manjaro will be their starting distro, then maybe they can start exploring EndeavourOS, going Garuda, SteamOS 3.0, or even later vanilla Arch. So it is actually the de facto recommendation and you can either accept it with the upcoming reality forged by Valve, or live in your own :)

You are exhibiting the worst qualities of the "I use Arch, BTW" mentality and are basically in violation of the "no disto wars" rule.

As a pseudo-Arch user, you should be technically capable enough to know that Steam ships its own runtime environment from which libraries are loaded. This runtime environment is also essentially never newer than your system libraries unless you are actually stuck on some really old Debian. You should probably also know that stable non-rolling distros still provide hardware-enablement updates and there are ways to install new drivers on them. This has been the case since 2010 and remains so until today. So, unless you happen to run a setup that requires a very specific open source driver that has just been recently released, your gaming experience is probably going to be more or less the same whether you run Pop or Arch.

Also, marching out the package manager argument is just strange. Pacman is pretty good, but honestly it's not significantly better than, say, dnf in normal use. Updates are speedy enough and while apt and dnf might be slower and broken in some ways, pacman is broken in other ways and has on occasion gotten its database mixed up on my system, which necessitated reading the wiki to figure out how to solve that. When apt breaks it usually basically tells you what you need to do to get it back in shape and I usually only manage to break it by being impatient.

It's just sad... Bad timing. The problem is solved, I read? Took what? Couple of hours to get a fix? How much time would have been required, on Windows, to get a fix for a similar issue? Next tuesday patch? Next month? I must admit that I never witnessed a Windows update bricking a PC or generate a BSOD, either...

But it's Linux, it doesn't have that margin. It must be nothing less than perfect, accross the board, on all distributions simultaneously, to convince mainstream users.

It was bad timing, but a valueable lesson for Linux platform; terminal needs to have safety guards or/and explain in a language beginners can understand. It doesn't have to do that for every single command, but for system breaking commands it's wise to do so.

It's just sad... Bad timing. The problem is solved, I read? Took what? Couple of hours to get a fix? How much time would have been required, on Windows, to get a fix for a similar issue? Next tuesday patch? Next month? I must admit that I never witnessed a Windows update bricking a PC or generate a BSOD, either...

But it's Linux, it doesn't have that margin. It must be nothing less than perfect, accross the board, on all distributions simultaneously, to convince mainstream users.

It was bad timing, but a valueable lesson for Linux platform; terminal needs to have safety guards or/and explain in a language beginners can understand. It doesn't have to do that for every single command, but for system breaking commands it's wise to do so.

Terminal did have a warning, but wording kind of still encouraged to proceed without reading the output. Of course people think they know what they're doing (Linus just wanted to install Steam). Maybe something like "I'm OK with removing these essential packages listed above". As that output comes from APT, fixing it will trickle down to pretty much to all Debian derivatives.

People learn though after been bitten once...

It will be also nice that packages go through little bit of automated testing. Hopefully the situation where package wants to remove essential packages is easy to detect.

FreeBSD has had Tinderbox for long time: https://github.com/dzlabs/tinderbox. It's system that verifies if ports install properly (ports are basically instructions how to build application and install it). I haven't yet seen anything similar for Linux, though that doesn't mean that such thing doesn't exist.

He claimed that a normal user would have reported the bug instead and that a normal user indeed reported the bug on GitHub, which then turned out to be a well-versed developer himself.

Which if you dig deeper you'll see that the reddit poster quote mined to find that well-versed developer, in reality the bug had been reported to the Pop!_OS github by many people including both normal users and devs like the one the reddit post highlighted.

This is not to say that the Pop!_OS maintainer could be a bit more PR friendly in his approach here.

I've been thinking about this whole affair some more and have now changed my mind slightly. What I think that we saw here in the LTT video was prejudice and ignorant behaviour from a Windows user.

The Linux terminal are so powerful and honestly so easy to use that many of us Linux users prefer to do work here and when helping others we tend to show examples from the terminal since it's way easier than having to guide them through a locale and DE dependent GUI.

The problem however is that this have somehow been translated into "you have to use the terminal to get things done in Linux".

Another prejudice which I honestly don't really know where it comes from is the notion that "stuff never works in Linux", I've mostly heard this from Windows people like Linus and both him and Luke have said it numerous times on their WAN show when talking about their Linux Challenge. In particular it came up in this very video in where Linus tries to install Steam and the GUI complaints with a warning and refuses to install.

Now we all know that this was due to a bug in the Steam package by the Pop!_OS maintainers, yes they blame Launchpad here but there are automatic ways to detect errors like this so this should never have been put into the repo to begin with. But as any computer user have ever known, besides when it happens on a system where he or she is not a fan of, all software have bugs and computers have never been 100% reliable. If any claims otherwise then ask them if they have ever restarted to fix something.

And it's here where those two prejudices comes to play, when encountering this problem Linus does not see it as a real problem but one of "Linux always does this" and he says as much when he claims that "People always tell me that Linux works and then things like this happens and the exact same thing happened when I tried Ubuntu some years ago". Which of course is not true since Ubuntu never had this exact problem with it's Steam package ever but I digress.

So the "Linux always does this" prejudice leads him to the conclusion that the displayed Warning is just Linux being an asshole and he have to search out another way to really make it work at which time the second prejudice kicks in which is "so I have to use the terminal to make things work in Linux".

How do we get people out of these prejudices? Because that is what we have to do, solving any of this in a technical way is not sufficient (since it basically really are solved), e.g Pop!_OS will now refuse to uninstall essential packages even with the do as I say! prompt unless a special file is present on the filesystem but we all know that this will only lead to the "next Linus" to put that file there because "that is what you have to do to have Linux work".

He claimed that a normal user would have reported the bug instead and that a normal user indeed reported the bug on GitHub, which then turned out to be a well-versed developer himself.

Which if you dig deeper you'll see that the reddit poster quote mined to find that well-versed developer, in reality the bug had been reported to the Pop!_OS github by many people including both normal users and devs like the one the reddit post highlighted.

This is not to say that the Pop!_OS maintainer could be a bit more PR friendly in his approach here.

Thanks, so that is what he meant by taken out of context (and why he deleted the tweets).

Edit: Went back to reddit and can't confirm that it was the reddit poster that specifically searched for that developer, nor that others reported it, unless you mean as comments in the GitHub issue opened by the one who the Pop!_OS developer linked to in his Twitter thread himself.

I was going by the words of the Pop maintainer (Jeremy) and he does not seam to have been completely honest if that is the case... I did check out the original poster of the issue and while he have 49 repos on Github he does so not as a programmer but as a Biochemist using R as a statistical tool, but I do see how he can be seen as a bit more experienced with things like Github than a normal user.

What bothers me a bit is that the System76 support page requires you to register before you can issue a ticket and that should be a big no no.

Terminal did have a warning, but wording kind of still encouraged to proceed without reading the output.

The current wording is problematic. It makes it seem like the same kind of bullshit gatekeeping that they're used to from Windows, so of course Windows Power Users are going to want to just force their way through it, just like they would on Windows. "Please break my system" would be my preferred wording: it's always good to be polite.

Pop!_OS will now refuse to uninstall essential packages even with the do as I say! prompt unless a special file is present on the filesystem but we all know that this will only lead to the "next Linus" to put that file there because "that is what you have to do to have Linux work".

Yep. They're just going to view sudo touch <filename> as one more esoteric incantation that they'll do - without understanding - as a way to get round what they view as unreasonable restrictions.

How do we get people out of these prejudices?

If I may add to you list, there is also a prejudice (or preference?) against warnings.
We tend to ignore them for a variety of reasons ( it won't happen to me, it doesn't apply to me, I've done it before and nothing bad happened then, this is just for liability, they are too cautious... Etc)

I'll admit I'm guilty of that myself, borking my install more times than I can count because I wanted to try something different or new.

If I may add to you list, there is also a prejudice (or preference?) against warnings.
We tend to ignore them for a variety of reasons ( it won't happen to me, it doesn't apply to me, I've done it before and nothing bad happened then, this is just for liability, they are too cautious... Etc)

I'll admit I'm guilty of that myself, borking my install more times than I can count because I wanted to try something different or new.

It's totally possible to bork install even when reading all the output. I think I did just that with Arch at some point. I don't remember borking the installation to point where I would actually reinstall with Gentoo though. Though with Gentoo installation is almost installing everything from scratch anyway, so understanding how system is built is kind of thing you have to learn or switch to another distribution.

With Windows though I just reboot in case of problems, I don't have wish to learn it deeper.

If I may add to you list, there is also a prejudice (or preference?) against warnings.
We tend to ignore them for a variety of reasons ( it won't happen to me, it doesn't apply to me, I've done it before and nothing bad happened then, this is just for liability, they are too cautious... Etc)

I'll admit I'm guilty of that myself, borking my install more times than I can count because I wanted to try something different or new.

It's totally possible to bork install even when reading all the output. I think I did just that with Arch at some point. I don't remember borking the installation to point where I would actually reinstall with Gentoo though. Though with Gentoo installation is almost installing everything from scratch anyway, so understanding how system is built is kind of thing you have to learn or switch to another distribution.

With Windows though I just reboot in case of problems, I don't have wish to learn it deeper.

Of course but then it's usually down to actual issues with the packages. With Arch I can imagine that you could e.g install a new version of libxx that is not abi/api compatible with some binary that are needed but that package have not been updated yet so congrats you now hosed something.