[ 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?

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.

7rokhym ,

It's great, I use it on 3 machines. Gigabyte Intel laptop with Nvidia GPU, Alien AMD desktop with Nvidia, and a Lenovo Intel desktop with AMD GPU. The separate installer for Nvidia GPUs is an awesome idea and took away my biggest headache (Nvidia driver issues). Installs were a breeze, performance is great. Laptop sleep /wake is very reliable. Intuitive UI and minimal fiddling meant I could get to work instead of troubleshooting issues. I only use Windows occasionally now for a couple games and Windows apps. I highly recommend.

Railison ,

I love the tiling interface. I haven’t touched it since they decided to start developing COSMIC though.

I’m gonna wait until they get everything up to date before I use it again.

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 ;)

Bizarroland ,

My problem with Pop OS is that on the two different machines I've installed it on it was very slow.

One of them made sense because it was an older mini Lenovo box, but the second machine I installed it on was a 10th gen Intel core i7 laptop with a Nvidia 2060 and 32 gigs of RAM and a decent one terabyte nvme SSD, and there would still be a massive pause with every click, somewhere between half a second and a second before anything would respond, and when updating or launching Firefox or anything it would always spin for a while and then pop up the sign saying this app is taking too long to respond.

Both of the devices were Lenovo devices, maybe there's some sort of fundamental incompatibility or missing driver or something but I couldn't cope with the lagginess of the OS.

Fedora worked swimmingly on both of them, for comparison.

possiblylinux127 ,
@possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip avatar

Pop Shop eats all resources. Try going to system monitor and killing it.

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

I'd just remove it with sudo apt remove pop-shop, and install cosmic-store (with cosmic-icons) instead.

Octorine ,

Ive been using it for several years. I hardly think about it at all, which is pretty high praise.

starman ,
@starman@programming.dev avatar

I really appreciate that they're working on new desktop environment. I'll probably switch from Hyprland to Cosmic once it's available on NixOS

mmstick ,
@mmstick@lemmy.world avatar

I think it already it is available on NixOS

starman ,
@starman@programming.dev avatar

Yeah, but sort of unofficially... I wait for this: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/259641

WastedJobe ,

Used it for a good while, but I moved to Nobara for more up to date packages. Might look into it again when Cosmic releases, it looks promising. I just hope they have some way to use Gnome extensions (or a replacement).

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

GNOME Shell extensions are JavaScript monkey patch injections to gnome-shell's JavaScript process. They're only compatible with the exact version of gnome-shell that they target because most of them require to override private internals of gnome-shell that are sensitive to order of injection and names of private variables and methods.

COSMIC uses a modern Wayland-based approach to shell interface design with layer-shell applets. Each applet is its own process, using the layer-shell Wayland protocol to render their windows as shell components, and communicating with the compositor securely with the security context Wayland protocol. The protocols they use are standardized, so they will be stable across COSMIC releases. Other Wayland compositors could integrate with them if they desire to.

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

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.

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.

BaldProphet ,
@BaldProphet@kbin.social avatar

For some reason, referring to a computer or VM that runs Linux as a "Linux box" triggers me.

hperrin ,

The UI seemed like it wasted a lot of space. I hope that Cosmic is better in that regard.

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

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