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A OS for everyone must just work. Such a bug is not acceptable. And just installingsteam is a basic use case that should work on any distro used for home PCs.

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captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
On the one hand, I’m going to call bullshit. As if Windows has never thrown an error in its 40 year history.

On the other, the whole point of doing an analysis like this is to identify the links in the accident chain. Which are:

A weird bug related to APT’s dependency metadata happeend in the steam .deb package. This bug specifically effected Pop!_OS because their Cosmic desktop, still pretty much a fork of Gnome, was so new that dependency info got written wrong. Most of the Linux ecosystem was not effected, only Pop!_OS users using the Cosmic desktop.

This bug was discovered, and fixed via issuing an updated package with the dependency data corrected. BUT, the version of the apt cache that was included in the ISO that Linus downloaded just happened to still point to the bugged version.

At no point during the install or user onboarding process does Pop!_OS walk the user through the process of a software update. It also does not seem to perform an apt update on launching or searching the Pop!_Shop. I believe it is/was configured to do that on a timed basis, and was trusting that…perhaps a little too much.

Linus tries to install Steam while on his period and he doesn’t handle an error message particularly well. He turns to using the terminal without really knowing what he was doing and ignores all warnings. On camera.

The design of the Pop!_Shop and over-trusting scheduled updates allowed the bugged package to slip through the cracks. Note this happened minutes after the install of the OS before any scheduled update had happened. Because no one installs software immediately after first boot, right? To their credit, the automated system saw the incompatibility and just errored out. So here comes Linus with the steel chair.

This is why I’m kind of cold on recommending trendy new distros to new users. Let’s very very slightly fork a DE for very petty reasons just enough to cause dependency problems, or let’s re-implement a package manager front end because we want a grid not columns so we’ll redo the whole thing and it’ll be fine.

At the time, Pop!_OS was the big “it solves this one little problem, so point all newbies at it” distro because they shipped a separate ISO for Nvidia equipped platforms. Problem is, other than that it’s just janked up Ubuntu Gnome.

No no! Use Bazzite. No no use Peppermint. No no, use Elementary. No no, use Endeavour. No no, use Nobara. This quarter the one all the newbies are bing told to use CachyOS. Get ready to never hear about CachyOS after 15 months from now.
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