From PopOS to Debian

Here are just some of my recent experiences, which I offer as a datapoint.

I have three Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablet computers that were running fairly old Ubuntu systems. I wanted to install something recent. I decided to try PopOS, mainly because I had the vague impression that the installation would be simple and driver situation would lead to a greater chance of sound and WiFi working without additional fiddling. I didn’t care about the desktop interface, because I run dwm

In fact the installation experience was good, and all the hardware worked immediately. By the way, these are excellent machines: quiet, retina touchscreen, runs Linux fine, and less than $200 on Ebay. I don’t admire Microsoft any more than the next Linux pilot, but they do make some nifty hardware.

However, after a while, I noticed fan noise from each of the machines at various times. Something was using 100% of a CPU core, forever, while nothing much should have been running on the computers.

It was a PopOS upgrade service. I didn’t ask for this to run and definitely didn’t want it. After killing the process, I tried getting rid of it with systemd and taking other measures, but it and related unwanted PopOS services kept coming back like zombies. I finally seemed to have succeeded by tracking down and deleting the binaries that the services use.

After poking around online I discovered that the runaway upgrade service has been plaguing PopOS users for a couple of years. I decided that this was an OS that I would prefer not to use.

I hadn’t tried installing Debian (pure Debian, not its parasitic offshoots) in a while, so I gave it a whirl. I downloaded the Debian “Trixie” iso and found the installer better than what I thought I remembered from installations past. It was smooth; the choices and instructions made sense. WiFi worked flawlessly. After booting the new system into the console, this too seemed better than the last time I tried Debian. The text was comfortably readable, and even had colors and so forth. After starting X11, I found that sound, the touchscreen, and everything else just worked. Also, the packages in the repository were surprisingly up to date (and I’m running Stable + Backports). Many were close to the latest upstream versions.

I guess the lesson is that recent kernels are even better than before at handling older and less common hardware, and that anyone installing Linux should seriously consider Debian unless they need something else. You get a solid, working system without any weird junk.