Pop!_OS development and no 22.10 release

You probably know that Pop!_OS is the strangely named Ubuntu-based Linux distribution from System76, the company that sells mostly rebadged Clevo laptops tested & supported for Linux specifically. You might have read on your favorite Linux news site that there will be no Pop!_OS 22.10 because their team is ‘focusing their development time onto the Rust implementation of COSMIC instead of 22.10’.

While I can really understand that it’s nicer to work on some greenfield implementation work than the tedious busywork of creating a release, I can’t help but think that the reason why making a new release is at least *partly* because of the way Pop!_OS has delivered their ‘unique features’ until now.

Many of their features are added by forking the original, mostly Gnome, apps and then adding their features.

With a setup like that, it gets tedious very fast to keep on rebasing your features on a moving target, especially since the upstream Gnome apps see a lot of work and change continuously themselves.

I understand it’s not easy to really ‘customize’ the existing Gnome apps otherwise, and adding features to your own for is infinitely easier than getting the upstream to accept your changes; but the downside is that it is indeed lots of work to keep your local copies up-to-date, and thus I do understand the choice of skipping 22.10.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s obviously a LOT happening i n Pop!_OS and I do appreciate that; I also understand that Pop!_OS probably has a smaller team working on their distro than Canonical or Red Hat, and that choices have to be made.

(also, it would be super great if the distribution can be renamed at some point; it might be personal but writing Pop!_OS with the underscore and the exclamation mark in the distribution name gets old very fast)