1. No snap packages!
2. Easy full disk encryption during install.
3. Optional tiling window manager right in gnome.
4. Nvidia drivers just work with no effort.
5. HiDpi displays just do the right thing with no effort.
I also use ZFS (non-root), which was just an 'apt install' away. This is also true on Ubuntu, but nice either way.
Only downside I've seen is that it's still X11. From what I read there were Wayland stability issues so they are giving that more time to bake.
Why is X11 bad? Our precious few F/OSS desktop apps are written for it (or OpenGl) so you can at best expect those to still work. Conversely, there's at least the problem of screen sharing not working with Wayland, and moreover possible trouble with drivers for both new and old graphics hardware, and with developers needing to retest and qa older apps for Wayland. X11 might be old, but there are no new apps coming with the exception of Electron apps or other abstraction layers such as OpenGl/Vulcan/DirectX or whatever Steam is using or cross-platform IDEs (IDEA/Java Swing-based, Eclipse/SWT-based, etc.)
Just for another data point, I haven’t gotten Wayland screen sharing to work reliably at all. I tried it in Fedora 35 and Ubuntu 22, where Wayland is the default. On Fedora it just didn’t work, and on Ubuntu, Firefox would crash every time. On Chrome it sort of worked after some updates. For Slack you needed to launch from the terminal with special environment variables. There were also weird bugs around docking my laptop, requiring hard resets. All in all, for any sort of modern remote work it wasn’t usable. I switched back to X11 and it’s been smooth sailing. I do miss the fancy trackpad gestures.
Don't use distributions that are stuck with older versions of libraries that are under a ton of active development. Wayland on Ubuntu was okay for me, but running up-to-date Wayland and Pipewire libraries fixed the issues I was having with the distribution's Wayland support.
If you have an AMD graphics card it’s fairly trivial to switch Pop_OS over.
I found it to be very obviously a clear improvement in app start time and general snappiness in the OS. To extent that meaningfully improved the experience.
Apparently there are gaming benefits too, steamdeck has adopted it for this reason.
Yes I have, with Ubuntu 22.04 and kubuntu 22.04. As a result, I've switched to Mac OS ;) Though not because of Wayland specifically but eg. libinput causing physical pain as opposed to the nonlinear/kinetic scroll synaptics had was definitely a contributing factor, along with other regressions making me want to throw my notebook out of the window.
X11 offers at least accessibility. The wayland team, to me, seems to be hyper-focused on reducing the duties of a GUI system to only providing basic interfaces. They didn't care about usability, accessibility and practicality, and they are currently (for the last few years) trying to pay this off.
Even more problematic is that X11 lacks user-noticeable deficiencies. Architecturally it has (partially severe) issues, but as an user, you don't notice. But if you're blind, need a screen reader, or want to use software enabling you to interact with the desktop environment outside of the classical, expected hardware (mouse, touchpad, screen), you're still out of luck. At least, screenshots mostly work now.
Wayland still doesn't provide reasonable accessibility, and X11 lacks real problems at least from an user perspective (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35430864). I think it's quite a hard sell, wayland is architecturally better and more easy to developers, and to users, its more bug-prone, feature-lacking and less-supported than X11.
I ran Linux Mint with X11 and KDE for a few months and it was mostly pleasant. (There was an issue with brightness controls when using auto-switching hybrid graphics, but I don't know if that's an X11 vs Wayland issue.)
> Only downside I've seen is that it's still X11. From what I read there were Wayland stability issues so they are giving that more time to bake.
I believe their in house DE is going to be Wayland based. I'm personally very excited, it may finally be the DE to unify my Linux boxes away from i3/Sway/GNOME.
Yeah this is the big one for me. I'm pretty convinced Secure Boot with a bring-your-own-key setup is the way. I understand Pop_OS doesn't want to invest the resources for this relatively niche market, but I'd love to switch if it allowed me to.
They’re not wrong. This is the code signing of your bootloader, kernel, etc that would prevent for example someone tampering with your boot partition to silently capture your encryption password the next time you type it in at boot. It’s a real threat but not one I’m concerned about. I have no idea if Pop OS not doing this is a regression from upstream Ubuntu or not.
The reason "secure boot" (yeah, scare quotes intended) is not the default for linux distributions:
> The boot loader and kernel must be signed with a trusted key recognized by the UEFI firmware. Microsoft maintains a widely trusted key for Secure Boot called the Microsoft UEFI Certificate Authority, and many Linux distributions use it to sign their boot loaders and kernels. This enables them to boot on systems with Secure Boot enabled by default.
Canonical has been substituting snap packages in for native packages on Ubuntu without letting end users know. If you know about it then you can disable snapd or only install through apt (as far as I know that still installs native packages), but it's still an opaque change to less technical users. You can still use snap packages on Pop_OS, but it's your choice to do so. On Ubuntu, it's a lot harder to "just not use it".
On Ubuntu apt installs the snap version of an app if one exists. I spent some time trying to figure out a workaround that didn't break my system but couldn't and just admitted defeat.
Uninstalling snap removed every web browser available short of lynx and w3m. That was fun. Trying to add one back also adds snap back. Next install I'm ditching Ubuntu.
Thanks for the correction and explanation. I haven't used Ubuntu in years, so all of my knowledge of its issues comes second-hand and I don't want to spread FUD about things that aren't actually issues. Sounds like the problem is worse than I thought, which just solidifies my decision to stay away.
Yes this is the reason I included it as a plus. Ubuntu will silently install snaps for some 'apt install' invocations, which is obnoxious. For me specifically snaps tend to get font rendering wrong and I'm not interested in troubleshooting why.
> or only install through apt (as far as I know that still installs native packages)
`apt install chromium-browser` installs Chromium as a snap package. If you don't have snapd installed, it'll "helpfully" install it for you.
It's become a binary choice between snap and flatpak, with flatpak being preferred by all major Ubuntu forks (Pop OS, elementary OS, Linux Mint). I won't be shocked if years from now Ubuntu decides snap is no longer worth it, like they did with Mir and Unity.
Mint is not flatpak based but it has Flatpak pre-installed in case you want to install some flatpaks. It doesn't have Snap pre-installed.
Alternatively, the *ubuntus have Snap pre-installed and recently said they are removing Flatpak support, although I believe the user can install Flatpak if they want to use flatpaks.
Not really. They run a root daemon, and browsers are moved there with no easy alternative. Makes them slower to start up. No way to keep the filesystem and mount table clean without surgery, multiple steps which will need to be repeated after every version upgrade.
If you can avoid all that by using Pop or Mint, why not?
A few years back I was tasked with building a deep learning workstation for my work (small startup). I put everything together, did a bit of research on which distributes to use, and put the PopOS image on a USB. This was done by 4pm so I told my manager “I’m going home; it’s going to take me all day to get everything setup and working so I’ll start tomorrow morning”.
The next morning I booted into the USB, and 15 minutes later was logged into the DE.
When pop came out, there was a lot of speculation that System76 would find that rolling their own distro was more of a challenge than expected, but they seem to have pulled it off. I have it running on my main personal laptop and have been really impressed. It feels more specifically polished for running as a desktop OS on a laptop than Ubuntu while still getting the whole ecosystem of software.
Seriously. I'm about as Linux-clueless as they come, and when Ubuntu ate itself during a dist-upgrade a few years back, I had no idea how to fix it so I switched to Pop. It's been nearly flawless; the bizarrely-slow antics of the Pop Shop being my only notable complaint.
I switched my partner over to Pop after she saw me using it as a daily driver on my boxes. She's now far more of a power user than I am. The measure of a good Linux, imo, is how much it inspires the user to customize it to their liking.
I do wish the Pop community would start up an initiative for building components for enterprise management. Much of it is already there because of SystemD but remote administration and management would be good. Something similar to Zorin Grid. The reason I'm a fan of this is so that I can use Pop at work.
PopOS is a really nice distro. It's all the convenience of ubuntu with a nifty tiling extension, a good set of preloaded drivers, and no annoying 'snap' packages (they use flatpak?). I'm glad it exists, and I look forward to their work on their wayland based cosmic de
I impulsively purchased an HP Dev One laptop a few months back, and expected I'd try Pop for a minute and end up with Ubuntu.
I've found Pop to be mostly similar but preferable (seems more Desktop oriented).
I've also had very few issues with (IME )typical Linux stuff (doesn't sleep, doesn't wake from sleep etc.) I can't say the same about my Ubuntu desktop, which struggles to maintain two weeks of uptime without one of these issues.
Pop shall remain for the foreseeable future.
This laptop does have issues with external displays, unfortunately, but has been used as a laptop 90% of the time so it's not a big issue. Fear that's the best one can expect with Desktop Linux.
Pop_OS was the first Linux OS I installed last year. It's true it just works once I'm inside. However, booting up was an issue for me. I always got a blank grey screen. It's been a while since I booted into it, but I think to get around it, I pressed some hotkeys to enter terminal and login through there. Then I'd be in the OS and everything was fine. I ended up using it that way for a bit before I guess the novelty wore off. I've been too busy to tinker with it since.
I have a 4 year old ThinkPad X1 extreme (1st gen) and I've been running Pop OS since almost day 1. I did run astray somewhere in the middle (Zorin, Manjaro, Windows) but found myself most comfortable with Pop.
Things just work: nvidia drivers, firmware updates, bluetooth, multiple screens, switching keyboards (bt to usb and vice versa), games (steam, heroic launcher), keyboard backlight (it's a pain on other distros for some reason), those little led indicators on fn buttons, the fn buttons!
The laptop overall is quieter (fans running slow), cooler, snappier - all with an amazing battery life.
This is compared to Windows - something that apparently Intel spent time testing this particular model of laptop with. (one of my relatives works there)
The tiling window manager is a productivity enhancer (feels better than i3wm to me, ymmv). I recently had the privilege of connecting to a 2K display using the thunderbolt port. This thing somehow felt faster (a couple 100ms, but it was noticeable). I have reached a point where Mac feels slow and Windows is just unusable. I'm having a great time with this OS.
Only 1 thing doesn't work: Intel WiFi display. But I guess that technology doesn't have enough market proliferation anyway. So. That.
I've been using it as my daily driver since Windows 7 became unusable (for me at least) last year. It's been a great experience. The issues i experienced were because Nvidia drivers + Linux don't always get along with some particular games, and some audio issues after an update (my motherboard is old, must be because of that).
There are some things that can be annoying, like;
Using 2 different wallpapers on two monitors required me to edit an image on Gimp and just set a single wallpaper.
I selected the wrong keyboard layout/language at install and now i must run a macro every time to force the correct one.
My ALSAMIXER is always at 10% volume on my USB headset on boot (but i suppose it's an easy fix).
I just cant run Vmware Player anymore, after a particular update from some months ago, the netmon module will not compile anymore.
But overall, everything is great;
For the games it can run (Steam + Proton), sometimes is better than windows!
I can run AI stuff (LLMs, stable-diffusion, etc) with absolute no issues or hiccups.
It's blazing fast.
I just miss some particular softwares that have never been ported to Linux, but that will be solved with time i hope.
After years of using Ubuntu exclusively, I replaced Ubuntu with Pop OS as my daily driver and haven't looked back. It's worked flawlessly and I've enjoyed the smoothed over rough edges it provides.
I'm also very much looking forward to the new window manager, Cosmic.
Edit: Now if we could just get it to run on Apple silicon, that would be amazing.
I have it on my S76 laptop but I don't use it much now, I'm more comfortable on win10 which I dual boot and also use on my desktop. I'm getting older, so its harder for me to context switch between windows/linux desktop environments.
However, I do like PopOS, I'm glad I got it pre-installed when I got the laptop, which I was on the fence about. I did have to tweak it to be like how I want, but that's true of every linux ever.
With win11 being such a disaster I suspect my windows days are finally numbered. Hopefully PopOS is still good when I finally need to switch full time.
The core selling point of Pop is that they've figured out all the configuration needed to make a bunch of existing software work well together. Instead of needing to tweak everything it all just works.
Sure you could start swapping around core components but it strongly suggests it's not the right desktop environment for you personally.
Audio has always been a tough spot for Linux in my experience. That said, I also have problems with MacOS too so my problem might lie somewhere between my chair and keyboard.
The problem is the manufacturer of your motherboard doesn't provide and/or update their drivers for Linux.
I know to the end user this doesn't really make a difference, but everyone seems to blame Linux when there really isn't anything Linux devs can do about this kind of thing.
I can blame the distro. It worked on KDE Neon which also uses pipewire, by setting a "lock configuration" option in the audio settings. Gnome and the pulse config UI don't have such an option.
I just looked up what I was using, and it's apparently 'pulseaudio on pipewire'. You'll forgive the confusion. Still, I've not seen anything like what OP is describing. I'm sure he could hook to some sort of 'plug-in' event and auto restart it, though that does sound irritating.
The updated version would look fairly similar, except most things would be routed to feed into either PulseAudio, ALSA or Jack. After that, it would be one big Dumb Funnel into PipeWire and out to your hardware.
Also a lot of that stuff is arguably obsolete. 90% of Linux apps will just dump audio to PulseAudio, which is neatly managed through PipeWire. A few professional apps use JACK2, which is also PW managed. Everything else will default to an ALSA sink wired through, you guessed it, PipeWire. It's like a boring and remarkably stable version of the Wayland situation.
I've got it running on an Intel NUC as well as a Lenovo IdeaPad 5 Pro. Both run great with it. Battery life on the IP5Pro was sketchy when I first got it because it's an AMD, but since then the Linux Kernel added amd-pstate and all's been fine.
There is surely a quantifiable way to measure how much a stupid or off-putting name like Pop!_OS or CockroachDB drives away potential users, especially in business.
I've been using Ubuntu since 7.04 and it's _fine_. But ubuntu-advantage, snap, ads in my motd-- It all leaves a bad taste and I'm ready for something new.
I'm going to make a switch when I get a new SSD. Pop_OS is #1 on my list to try.
I started using Ubuntu back in Hardy Heron days (8.04). I remember attending an Ubuntu user's group meeting in Denver back then and the System76 guys were there. I was impressed by their knowledge and willingness to help others.
I strayed to Mint for the last 10 years or so and only recently gave Pop_OS a try. I was delighted to see the "Welcome to Colorado" wallpaper on there right after installation. Now Pop_OS is the only distro I use. Hats off to System76 for their contribution.
I recently inherited an HP All-In-One desktop that was extremely sluggish with Windows. I have yet to find anything seriously wrong with Pop_OS and feel it really strikes a good balance. Yes the Pop!_Shop is definitely the weak point. It worked great for many applications, but when it didn't I was able to install fairly painless using other options (apt-get...).
When you type `apt install foo` you always get a deb, they don't sneak a snap or flatpak behind your back (unlike Ubuntu).
If you open up Pop Shop (their GUI alternative) you'll see both flatpaks and debs. If an app could be installed by either they have a dropdown next to the install button that defaults to flatpak.
I think that's probably the best compromise possible. Power users get what they want, novices get something that probably just works, and intermediate users are guided towards learning about the distinction.
In the Pop!_Shop you can often find both the deb version or the flatpak, so you can avoid them quite easily. For things that only appear with a flatpak option you can usually find other ways to install, after a little searching on the web.
It's very clear in the Pop!_Shop whether it's a flatpak or not, which is nice ....
I have often seen multiple entries in the pop shop for things like kodi or vlc, and it can be a crap shot on if it works or not. sometimes there's a dropdown but often it's two entries in the search results with similar descriptions and no indication of installation method.
Other than that, best desktop linux experience so far for me.
I stand corrected! Thanks for posting, as I had a limited experience and was happy that most of my applications fell into the first category below:
I just tested it out and some applications like GIMP and INKSCAPE appear as a result and when you click on it, it has a drop-down in which you can choose between the flatpak and deb version. Unfortunately the flatpak is the default choice, so many people would probably never even know about the alternative choice.
Other applications a clearly different, and it's not clear what you are getting. Like VLC.
Then you have some like BATTLE FOR WESNOTH that shows two results. One of the two (if you activate it) has the drop-down, but both choices are flatpaks. The other result is apparently NOT a flatpak, but not clear in what it is.
I now see I have more flatpaks than I believed I had. They are working nicely at least, the ones I am using.
They should drop the underscore. At the time I wrote this comment "pop" appears 21 times on this page, and only 3 of those times bother to follow it with an underscore.
The brand is Pop or Pop OS. The only thing the underscore accomplishes is communicating "this is at least a little awkward" which I hope they don't intend.
Branding is important, and "Pop!_OS" is unique but not in a good way.
I've known people who have been running PopOS (my preferred) for years who can't remember if the bang comes after the pop, or after the os. And everyone hates the underscore.
Don't leave us hanging like that! What does it mean? I searched the web, but found nothing aside from "popos" being the plural of "popo", meaning police.
Backwards compatibility was an extremely hard requirement for Win95. A shiny Linux distro would be dead on arrival for any business use case. Red Hat barely made the news with "Mother's Day" in '95.
1. No snap packages! 2. Easy full disk encryption during install. 3. Optional tiling window manager right in gnome. 4. Nvidia drivers just work with no effort. 5. HiDpi displays just do the right thing with no effort.
I also use ZFS (non-root), which was just an 'apt install' away. This is also true on Ubuntu, but nice either way.
Only downside I've seen is that it's still X11. From what I read there were Wayland stability issues so they are giving that more time to bake.