[ META ] What is the community's opinion of Pop!_OS?

It’s an Ubuntu downstream maintained by Linux box maker System76 which is targeted for both general usability and design/media applications. They will soon be debuting their own home-spun desktop environment, Cosmic DE, which is highly anticipated by the Linux community.

How does the community here feel about this distribution and the company that has brought it to us? How do you feel about the projects that they’re working on, and their goals for the distribution moving forward?

spaphy ,

I’ve had Linux pop OS on a USB and ran it for about a year and a half total before switching on and off to windows. I think it’s one of the few OSes that actually work on all my devices even obscure thinkpads. I’d still use it today however -

My issues with Linux as a whole stem from absolutely trash antivirus and auditing perspective. Windows suffers this in many ways but I think they’re a live service rather than a static service. I’ll give an example, we’re getting bitlocker encryption with backup support keys etc in case a user gets locked out of a device on all devices very soon in W11h24 I believe, as a default. Pop OS comes with disk encryption but if I forgot my password or what have you, or even want to make a USB encryption key to unlock the device if I forgot it, I’d be in trouble. There’s an element of user friendliness that OSX and Windows have, that Linux just doesn’t have. I get scared running these open source applications when we’re essentially in a Cold War and I need to depend on them for my business. Especially if the apps are developed in JavaScript there’s so many dependencies I can’t verify. I can use portmaster and some log trailing to sift it but something about it feels like I am still not secure.

gregorum OP ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

I’m gonna venture to guess that your problems are not with your operating systems. Best of luck to you.

spaphy ,

Lick my sack

glouriousgouda ,
@glouriousgouda@lemmy.myserv.one avatar

It was too far from the metal for me. But it is a great distribution. Especially if you're looking for fancy pants gaming ability or just turn-key ready to roll MS alternative.

gregorum OP ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

Lemme guess: arch? ;)

glouriousgouda ,
@glouriousgouda@lemmy.myserv.one avatar

😀 I sure sound like it. Debian these days though. I'm too lazy for Arch anymore.

gregorum OP ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

Right? I’m ok with my computer being a bit of a hobby, but it shouldn’t be a side-job unless I’m getting paid, goddammit.

glouriousgouda ,
@glouriousgouda@lemmy.myserv.one avatar

Absolutely! When I was 20ish and new, yeah. But it hit me about 3years ago thats ALL I do professionally is automate as much as I can to make life easier for users and companies. Why am I not doing that for me?

On a side note, I'm seriously loving the immutable distributions. I'm thinking that's my new direction.

Sorry to rattle on lol

gregorum OP ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

Like… I like to tinker and fiddle, but, at the end of the day, I want stable and reliable. So I love PopOS, but should I really be on Fedora or openSUSE Tumbleweed? Like… eh… am i old?

Lol

glouriousgouda ,
@glouriousgouda@lemmy.myserv.one avatar

😀

cflewis ,
@cflewis@programming.dev avatar

You sound like the target audience for Bluefin. I'm running it and it's excellent.

gregorum OP ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

Stop it, you

todd_bonzalez ,

Pop! Is a solid Ubuntu-based distro. I use it on my MSI gaming PC and my System76 laptop.

The S76 (Lemur Pro) laptop is nice, but it isn't excellent, especially not for the price. I'm happy with it, but I probably won't buy another one unless they make significant improvements to the screen and chassis.

Lettuceeatlettuce ,
@Lettuceeatlettuce@lemmy.ml avatar

I'm interested to try their Cosmic desktop later this year.

Overall, seems like a solid company, I've heard good things about their laptops, although I've never had one myself.

Pop_OS as a distro, heard generally good things about. The few times I've messed around with it have been fine. The folks that stick with it seem to like it.

MoonMelon ,

Bought a lemur pro 9 a few years ago and have it as a daily driver since. Pop OS works great for the most part but, as other people have mentioned, PopShop is slow/buggy and I often just resort to apt instead. My spouse plays a lot of PC games so when she got sick of Windows I migrated her over, and she's had very few problems. Every once in awhile a game won't run but usually that gets figured out in a few weeks by the Proton community.

A few content creation linux apps only officially support Redhat, so getting them to run is a bit of a pain but that would be the case with any Debian based distro. So overall I haven't seen the need to distro hop to Mint or something similar.

deadbeef79000 ,

I really don't like that underscore.

gregorum OP ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

Agreed

bionicjoey ,

The correct way of saying it out loud is "pop exclamation point underscore O S"

swooosh ,

And I thought it's popos which is German and stands for asses

gregorum OP ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

No, you’re thinking of SUSE, which is German for “boringbutstablelinuxdistribution”.

Oddly, that short word-long word English/German translation thing works both ways.

deadbeef79000 ,

No, your thinking of RHEL which is danish for "redhatsegregiouslicensingbullshit".

gregorum OP ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

Funny, it used to stand for “payfortwentyfloppiesorcompileitfromscratchwedareyou”

It only took me 28 hours after a seven day download at 28.8 KBPS on my 25MHz 486 Packard Bell POS, but those motherfuckers never got a penny from me!

deadbeef79000 ,

Gentoo enters the chat

gregorum OP , (edited )
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

Don’t you even fucking get me started, I am so serious, lol

Edit: gentoo was why I said, “fuck this, I’m buying a Mac,” and refused to even think about Linux again for 5-6 years. And I have the OS X/macOS’s being UNIX to thank for that, btw.

The “shield” Apple puts over its OS can be pierced by powerusers who know how to use the terminal, and there are package managers like Homebrew that allow users to install ports of Linux/UNIX/BSD userland apps. In reality, macOS is an extremely-customized build of BSD that’s locked down in many ways, and runs a proprietary filesystem and on property hardware. (That’s a lot of suck, yes). But, otherwise, it’s still POSIX, and so similar to Linux as to easily facilitate a transition. And, because of it, I drifted back to Linux.

Not necessarily because of macOS’s shortcomings, but because I like to tinker and fiddle, and Linux scratches that itch.

deadbeef79000 ,

I'm reasonably sure it's the popping sound you make with your mouth oh ess.

starman ,
@starman@programming.dev avatar

PopOS would be better (IMO)

deadbeef79000 ,

I quite like "Pop!OS".

Or perhaps a play on IBM: OS/Pop!

Now that I think about it. It's just the !_ being beside each other that bugs me: OS_Pop! is cool.

ulkesh ,
@ulkesh@beehaw.org avatar

You and me both. I’d rather it just be Pop!OS. Or just, Pop. Or the better term: Soda.

eveninghere ,

Me a programmer has a bigger issue with !

ulkesh ,
@ulkesh@beehaw.org avatar

I love the fact that System76 is an American company pushing Linux forward (well to certain degrees, anyway). I know they use hardware produced in other countries (for chassis at minimum, not sure about the rest of the components), but it’s still nice to see.

Next time I’m in the market for a laptop, I’ll certainly give them a solid look (hopefully the form factors of the more powerful systems will be less…girthy…by then).

Pop!_OS is quite solid. I’ve used it from time to time. However, I’m partial to Arch because I like to be closer to the bleeding edge (currently using Garuda for my gaming rig).

Darkraisisi ,
@Darkraisisi@feddit.nl avatar

It is where i started my linux journey 3 years ago. And where i stayed all this time. It had a nice environment setup and for me with cuda accelerated ML it is amazing with the easy drivers.

zod000 ,

Even though I wasn't a fan of their modified Gnome DE, I really like the distro as a whole. It made it seamless to use both AMD and Nvidia cards, Steam worked out of the box, and I had no issues with using Ubuntu or Debian repos. I'm not sure whether I'll use Cosmic or not, but I'll probably give it a fair try eventually.

Sylvartas ,

I have only used it for a little more than a day so far, but I'm already in love with it because it basically required 0 tinkering to get my Nvidia GPU to work, and the few games I have tried have been running almost flawlessly.

ADTJ ,

I recently tried this for the first time for my grandad on an old dying laptop of his which was struggling to run at any speed.

During the install it had already messed with the hard drive partitions in order to run the live environment, which is a big no-no for me.

The whole point of the live environment is it shouldn't change the system until you try to install!

It also meant I no longer had a free partition to install to anymore so I couldn't even get through the installer since I also couldn't resize etc. because the partition was in use.

Been using Debian/Ubuntu based Linux for about 20 years and never seen this issue until Pop! OS

gregorum OP ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

During the install it had already messed with the hard drive partitions in order to run the live environment, which is a big no-no for me.

WHAA??‽!!

Ok, I’ve been dealing with this distribution for close to a decade and I’ve installed it on over a dozen machines of all sorts of configurations. I’ve never heard of this. I’m very curious as to hooooow this happened.

From all of my experience and everything I know, this absolutely should not have happened and could only be the result of some sort of mistake or bug or some usual circumstance. This is not the typical or normal experience.

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

I once had a installer crash and wipe my drive in the process.

gregorum OP ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

Like, as a bug, right? Not as SOP?

I mean, I get that - as a rare occurrence - shit can go wrong. I wouldn’t blame openSUSE (for example) if that happened during an install. I’d just assume it was a bug and that I was having a shitty day.

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

It was some new distro that I forgot everything else about. It was very new so it problems were to be expected. I just didn't expect it to wipe out my disk. I was trying to dual boot.

gregorum OP ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

I get where you’re coming from, it just blows my mind that you encountered this outrageously rare problem that must certainly have been a bug.

You must understand, this was not intended behavior, nor should this ever have happened. I’m very sorry for your experience.

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

That was many years ago back when Linux was the new kid on the block

gregorum OP ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

Popos has only been around for 6 1/2 years. Linux has been around since the 90s.

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

It wasn't Pop OS

gregorum OP ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

Oh, sorry, I missed that, lol

ADTJ ,

Yeah just tried it again now.

I deleted the partition again first, then when I got to the installer, it had created a new 50GB partition and mounted /var/crash and /var/log which can't be unmounted (tried force unmount and all that jazz)

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

It shouldn't have touched anything

Doods ,

A semi-rolling distribution, with access to Ubuntu's many PPA's, and easily removable extensions that reveal the lovely vanilla Gnome experience, it's great!

Also they are making a Rust desktop, which I am currently running, though not daily driving.

theshatterstone54 ,

How are you running COSMIC? I'm on Fedora.

Doods , (edited )

I am on Pop!_OS, I ran sudo apt install cosmic*.

Don't worry, you're not missing out on much, running video games, or any OpenGL thing including 2D games and GPU-accelerated terminal emulators is a bad experience, and alt+f4 isn't implemented, and f11 to fullscreen is janky, and theming for buttons and such is clearly alpha.

The promise of an Arabic-supporting, Rust based, GPU-accelerated terminal is too attractive, however, as I was teared between multilingual terminal, Wezterm, Alacritty and Kitty for a while.

The first is horrible at everything but supporting languages, the second is really janky, the third doesn't support tabs, the fourth has bad theming and customization.

umbrella ,
@umbrella@lemmy.ml avatar

what are the benefits of a gpu-accelerated terminal?

mmstick ,
@mmstick@lemmy.world avatar

Consumes less energy (CPU) while also rendering more responsively.

mmstick , (edited )
@mmstick@lemmy.world avatar

What GPU configuration do you have? I don't have any of these issues. If NVIDIA, you have to wait for NVIDIA to release explicit sync Wayland drivers.

theshatterstone54 , (edited )

You're not missing out on much

Seems that you're right. It's almost usable currently, but it lacks some essential things for me, mainly some further snappiness and customisable key binds (old habits die hard and I'm not adapting my habits and workflow to new keybinds).

But after these get fixed, I can see myself potentially running COSMIC. This makes me even more excited for what the future will bring.

Edit: Also, sloppy focus aka focus-follows-mouse

And an option for static workspaces i.e a set number of workspaces that are constantly there, instead of dynamic workspaces that close with your windows and change your workflow because you closed the window on Workspace 4 so workspace 5 is now workspace 4 so when you go looking for the window on workspace 5, it's not there.

Andromxda ,
@Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

There's a COPR repo ryanabx/cosmic-epoch

theshatterstone54 ,

And it works and seems to be regularly updated! Thanks for bringing this to my attention!

mfat , (edited )

I never use "derivative" distros. I don't want to run into weird problems and spend hours troubleshooting only to find out they have changed some config file.

gregorum OP ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

What distro do you use, out of curiosity? System V?

J/k. What do you run?

mfat ,

Fedora Workstation

LeFantome ,

I cannot answer your question obviously but there are several “primary” distros.

Debian, Fedora, Arch, Void, Alpine, Chimera, RHEL, SUSE, Gentoo, and others are all built from scratch. You do not have to use SystemV. The closest to that is probably Slackware I guess.

PopOS is based on Ubuntu which is itself based on Debian.

gregorum OP ,
@gregorum@lemm.ee avatar

i know. i was making a joke ;)

LeFantome ,

Their new COSMIC desktop is generating a tonne of buzz. It may spill over to the distro in general.

I am not a PopOS user but, watching the evolution of COSMIC, System76 seems very user focussed and makes sensible decisions. That bodes well for the overall OS.

vizzi ,

I installed this on my touchscreen laptop after trying and failing to get many other distros to work with the touchscreen.

With Pop! it just worked.

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