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

I really don't like that underscore.

The correct way of saying it out loud is "pop exclamation point underscore O S"
- And I thought it's popos which is German and stands for asses
- I'm reasonably sure it's the popping sound you make with your mouth oh ess.
Agreed
PopOS would be better (IMO)
- 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.
You and me both. I’d rather it just be Pop!OS. Or just, Pop. Or the better term: Soda.
Me a programmer has a bigger issue with !

I wish they based it on Debian. It definitely earns my personal recommendation for default distros alongside LMDE

I dont understand why they didnt. Debian with gnome is essentially the same imo.
- Ubuntu is Debian with more up-to-date packages and a lot of additional third party packages. There's a lot of companies who produce development toolkits, frameworks, and applications that are explicitly built for the Ubuntu base. Some governmental agencies and organizations also require access to packages and repositories that have been audited by security agencies, which Ubuntu has gone through the process of getting certification for certain kernels and their Ubuntu Pro repositories. All of which are useful for real world customers.
  
  Regardless of shortcomings in Snap, Pop does not rely on Snaps, and offers its own packaging for things that would otherwise require Snap on Ubuntu.
If a company with some resources makes a good Debian unstable based distro with a decent release cycle (could even be yearly), they’ll dominate the desktop market.

Made the switch to Pop!_OS from Win10 half a year ago, and my machine's been purring like a happy cat ever since. All my games still run (thanks, Proton!) and some even had a significant performance boost (RDR2 being the best example) with a 3090. Only problem I had was getting DaVinci Resolve to work properly, but I caved and bought the Studio version which runs perfectly.

Your story is almost a carbon copy of mine. Really enjoyed using Pop.
I've only used DaVinci for small projects, so I don't know their eco system too well, but what made you buy a product when you were having problems getting it to work? :O Does the studio version offer better hardware acceleration or something like that?
- It had to do with encoding which works out-of-the-box in the Studio version, and not at all in the free version on Linux. I could've solved it by using something like Handbrake, but I didn't want to add the extra step to my workflow. I also bought my Blackmagic 6K second-hand, so I've been wanting to properly pay them for their awesome products for a while now anyway.

I like their window manager, pop-shell, and use it on Fedora. I used to daily Pop but just can't stand Ubuntu.

As someone newer who has only used Ubuntu and Mint, what do you get elsewhere?
Why can’t you stand Ubuntu?
- I imagine it being about snaps. People seems to hate snap with a passion.
  
  I still use Ubuntu in certain cases. Their LTS offerings are excellent.

I think their current modified gnome is the best desktop that exists anywhere. Cosmic is a full desktop environment with an actual (auto) tiling window manager... a combo I think should be more common in desktops. The way they implement the tiling makes it really easy for beginners to use because you can turn it on/off by keyboard shortcut or clicking the plugin icon, and because you can just drag n drop windows to change their tiled positions (along with keyboard shortcuts if preferred). It's hard to go back regular "window managers".

The System76 devs have good ideas, they seem really cool, and sane! They have been a net positive for the Linux community and desktop development IMO. I am SO hyped for the new Cosmic DE!

You realise KDE's had tiling for years, right? (Bismuth and then native)
- There's a very large gap between having tiling, and having excellent auto-tiling capabilities with intuitive shortcuts and behaviors. COSMIC's autotiling was designed from the ground up to be just as usable with a mouse as it is with a keyboard.
- Bismuth (and Krohnkite before) never worked nearly as well for me, and AFAIK are both abandoned. The built in tiling is closer to FancyTiles/tiling zones, not auto-tiling like Pop Shell. Pop Shell also has been here for “years” by that metric lol
- Well not really because I never stuck around on KDE very long. But I'm aware you can have tiling on any DE if you want. Its about the out of box experience you get on Pop. Its also important (for me) that the tiling is done automatically, no fiddling.

I generally find it to be a family friendly sheen on top of ubuntu so I've been installing it for friends and family lately. I would prefer debian based but shrug. They'll probably get there eventually.

POP is an excellent distro for a number of use cases. I can't speak to System 76 hardware but Pop is definitely one of the good Distros. I have used it for about 5ish years to run Davinci Resolve on video editing laptops and workstations. Another use case for POP was for breaking Mac OS acclimated relatives out of their walled gardens. Relatives as old as 80 have had very little problem adjusting to it after having help installing it. Looking forward to Cosmic but I will make sure I have backups and other stuff to tinker with during the transition - was the same way during Wayland transition on my other machines.

Positives

Davinci Resolve working with a little bit of fiddling and continues to run solidly.
No hassle with Nvidia drivers on editing laptop.
4-5 years daily driver on Thinkpads (t460,13) and other older laptops (daily use)
Gaming on Nvidia good.
Elder folks adjust easily from Mac OS. Its basically Macbuntu for them without the complete pile of shit that is Snaps.

Negatives

POP Shop was kinda shite. Had a few problems years ago. Wasn't patient during upgrades or used terminal. A couple of shitty things happening recently but looking forward to testing out everything Cosmic (I have a rock solid edit station that will remain AMD on Endeavour OS to make sure I can still work).
Name doesn't bother me, but would be better as just POP OS

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.

Lemme guess: arch? ;)
- 😀 I sure sound like it. Debian these days though. I'm too lazy for Arch anymore.

I like their company and what they do for Linux. I wish I had a use for a laptop but then I would be stuck between system76 or framework.

And tuxedo. Depending on your country.

I suspect it will replace Ubuntu as the new noob distro, which is a good thing. Doesn't run as fast on older hardware as mint w cinnamon, but that's not a big deal. I'm hoping the new DE will improve that.

Love how feature rich it is, especially love the switch to toggle tiling windows on the desktop.

Use it on my lenovo carbon x1 flawlessly. Love it.

Solid but occasionally buggy

COSMIC looks cool

Visuals were striking, but on non-System 76 hardware the thing as a whole broke several times cuz updates. Would love to try out some System76 hardware one of these days though.

Ive had good success across three non system 76 machines. It is Ubuntu under the covers. I'd expect most of it to work as well as ubuntu does.
Personally, I’ve installed it on at least a couple of dozen machines that definitely weren’t from system 76, and not one of them them had a problem.

I’m curious, what sort of issues did you have?
- Simple updates brought the system down, it was long enough ago that I do not remember the exact cause but I remember the frustration lol.
Funny. I‘m using it on an asus a15 and its rocksolid so far. Sorry you made that experience though.

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.

How are you running COSMIC? I'm on Fedora.
- There's a COPR repo ryanabx/cosmic-epoch
- 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.

I use pop for my nvidia laptop and it works great. System76 seems to be on the right track and I‘m curious what they have in store for the future.

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.

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.

I have used it on my Lenovo X1 Extreme as my daily driver for years. Bulletproof.

I have a Gazelle 16 laptop, and was in PopOS for a while too, even before this laptop, when I had a 17" Alienware. However, I've moved on to Fedora now, and can't go back to anything Ubuntu or Ubuntu based again. Fedora is just too great a balance between stable and cutting edge, Ubuntu feels old real quick, and so do all it's derivatives and downstreams.

I loved the Gnome based Cosmic, best Tweak of Gnome ever in my opinion, but other than that, I just can't leave Fedora behind anymore. Even Ublue distros are amazing.

Care to elaborate on what really sold you on fedora?

Also, the new cosmic DE will be available for all distros
- Not OP, but my reasons for choosing Fedora is, it just works. I use the Atomic version of it which is an image based operating system. Installing packages or updates does not leave the system unstable. I can simply rollback to previous version. Also Fedora pushes entire Linux community forward by adopting potential technologies like Flatpak, PipeWire, Wayland etc earlier compared to other distros.
  
  (I also run NixOS which I believe has more potential and solves many problems than Fedora).
  
  Having said that there are two downsides to Fedora.
  
  Fedora is closely associated with Red Hat. I wish it is purely community driven.
  
  Fedora does not offer LTS kernels (Maybe it would threaten Red Hat, if Fedora is too stable).
- First, an integral distaste for everything remotely associated with Ubuntu, on a principle as well as on a stability and usability front. As I mentioned, the best balance between stability and cutting edge tech is on Fedora and other Fedora based distros. No other come close to that balance. See some people mention DNF, but for me that's just another packager, could not care less.
  
  As for the atomic versions that I see many mention regularly, I'm giving them a try, even have bazzite running on my laptop right now trying to see if I can actually like it, but it's not looking promising. Atomic versions I've tried seem to be slower than regular distros for boot an apps launch (work fast enough after, though). Then there's the fact that, while they are great for "fire and forget", that same feature makes them very convoluted to achieve some system level stuff,reqyiring morework and tinkering than with a regular distro.
- First, an integral distaste for everything remotely associated with Ubuntu, on a principle as well as on a stability and usability front. As I mentioned, the best balance between stability and cutting edge tech is on Fedora and other Fedora based distros. No other come close to that balance. See some people mention DNF, but for me that's just another packager, could not care less.
  
  As for the atomic versions that I see many mention regularly, I'm giving them a try, even have bazzite running on my laptop right now trying to see if I can actually like it, but it's not looking promising. Atomic versions I've tried seem to be slower than regular distros for boot an apps launch (work fast enough after, though). Then there's the fact that, while they are great for "fire and forget", that same feature makes them very convoluted to achieve some system level stuff,reqyiring morework and tinkering than with a regular distro.
- @gregorum @jjlinux newer packages and it wasn’t arch. Plus I like dnf.

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.

I’m a pop_os enjoyer, the window manager is great especially on a small laptop screen. Also have it running in the living room on a media pc (streaming, light gaming, music etc) and it’s been fantastic for that application as well. Excited for the upcoming switch to cosmicDE, think that will be chef kiss for me.

I really like it. I tried several distros for my first dedicated desktop Linux machine and pop was the one that clicked. I like that it's not trying to mimick windows UI, and only sorta behaves like macOS. Everyone else was too close to win10. Which I understand is a selling point, so to speak, but I'm so sick of windows that I wanted it to look and act differently.

Is good, I got bored though as they haven't released a major update since 2022. On opensuse tumbleweed now.

Not having the bugs of using gnome extensions for customisations is nice.

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).

I like it! It was the first distro I used when I started using Linux full time. It just works most of the time, (other than the Pop Shop) and fixes most of the issues I have with Gnome. I'm looking forward to seeing how Cosmic works once it is ready to go, and I'm hoping their new shop I just read about works well!

When I first started using it I wanted something that was far away from the Windows look, and it does it well. Maybe it's weird, but having it look wildly different from Windows put me in a different mindset and helped me learn the Linux way of doing things rather than trying to make Linux work like Windows.

I'm still running it on my main gaming rig, but I've been doing a lot of experimenting on my other computers. I've gotten to really like both Budgie and Plasma since then, and I'm using distros with those DEs on them on two of my other computers.

Pop Shop

Install the cosmic-store (with cosmic-icons) and try it out!
- I didn't realize it could be installed already, I'll give that a go. Thanks!

This sounds like written by an Ai or some marketing person...

Ordinary people don't use phrases like "box maker System 76" or "highly anticipated by the Linux community"...:)

I’m sorry you think that.

Get out more.
- He's got a point though, these sound more like 'online article on tech website' phrases, less like a community post. Not meant to be insulting, I just like to analyse language.
- greg just fucking cooked
- No, he's right. You sound like you're writing a corporate ad.
I thought the exact same thing. It’s written like the uncanny valley of English.

My only experience was on a shared machine (the $5,000 prebuilt offering) where one of the less tech literate people messed with nvidia drivers for data science. Worse, I was remote and it had some software from IT running.

Basically some combination of those things meant we ended up running it in recovery mode and all shared the same user. I think I downplay how shit that job was in my head.

The support from the company was ASS and I'm doubtful there was a human responding for the first few messages. I gave them very detailed logs of the issue, with links to their own documentation, and their response suggested they didn't read past the first sentence. Really can't imagine why I wouldn't just stick to debian when the company support is worthless even after giving them 5k.

What year was this? Very rarely, I have heard bad experiences like this, but they were from a long time ago. From everything I’ve heard since (I’ve never had to contact their support, myself), their support - and their hardware - has massively improved.

Edit: I also have heard (unconfirmed) that they have a separate B2B unit now that has a separate support unit, too.
- About a year and a half ago. I am the anxious bug filling type as well, I make my questions very clear and provide all the info I anticipate they may need. That does not help when the info is not read. I had to copy and paste quite a bit from previous emails. This is while I was at a pretty significant institution as well.

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.

I used Pop!_OS when transitioning from Windows 11 to Linux and ran it for about 3/4 months before deciding to try EndeavourOS. I had absolutely no issues with Pop and it really made the transition super easy.

I'm super excited to try out their new (cosmic) DE! I will probably install Pop on my 2nd SSD to test and play around with it.

I’ve been thinking about running EndeavorOS but seeing people here complain about Arch breaking when the AUR is used, makes me shy away from EOS. Do you use packages from AUR and have you had any issues with the OS? Running Tumbleweed right now.
- Any problems I've had have been my own doing or a weird Nvidia driver issue. Having said that though, I've had very very few issues, it has been rock solid!
  
  I've got a couple of packages from the AUR but I don't recall ever having any issues with any of them.
  
  The only real "issue" I've had has been related to the Linux Kernel on my main machine (Ryzen 5 3600 & Nvidia GTX1660 TI). For some reason, only the LTS and mainline kernel work, if I try any other kernel I get an error (something to do with Nvidia and my GPU).

I like it, I think it's a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu is these days, if you know what I mean. And I'm really interested to see how the COSMIC desktop environment works out.

Also I really like their laptops. I want to get a Pangolin one day lol.

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).

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.

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

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.

Pop Shop eats all resources. Try going to system monitor and killing it.
- I'd just remove it with sudo apt remove pop-shop, and install cosmic-store (with cosmic-icons) instead.

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.

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

J/k. What do you run?
- 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.
- Fedora Workstation

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

I think it already it is available on NixOS
- Yeah, but sort of unofficially... I wait for this: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/259641

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pop is sick and absolutely shines on laptop.

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

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.
- I once had a installer crash and wipe my drive in the process.
- 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)
It shouldn't have touched anything

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.

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

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

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.

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

It used to be one of if not the greatest entry point for new Linux users, nowadays they got too worked up on their beef with GNOME, are trying to do their own thing and it honestly looks kinda pathetic.

If COSMIC is pathetic, then GNOME must be abysmally unusable. COSMIC was already planned long before there was any beef with GNOME. We listen to user feedback and prioritize development of features that our developers and users want. Good luck trying to replicate COSMIC's theming and tiling capabilities in GNOME. Let alone the overall stability and performance of COSMIC. COSMIC Store is the fastest app store on Linux now. I'd recommend everyone to try it out. sudo apt install cosmic-store
- My comment did sound way more aggressive than I intended, and I apologize for that, but getting this defensive as an answer when the question asked for an opinion definitely isn't any less pathetic. I have a lot of respect on the work of the Pop team, and Pop was the first distro I have used, but none of your points are... good?
  
  Gradience fills the need for theming in an individual level for those that want it without breaking the look and feel of apps without the developers' intent at a distribution level;
  
  Forge replicates most of Pop's tiling capabilities, picking up the great work your team did over the years without intending to drop it for your own thing;
  
  Performance is something that isn't necessarily lacking in other DEs and stable is a bold statement for a product still in alpha. Hopefully it really is whenever it gets a stable release though, I'm not rooting against your work;
  
  Also, it isn't hard to say your app store is the fastest when it doesn't have the years of crust other ones gathered from all the work put into it. I would get worried if it wasn't.

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