[ META ] What is the community's opinion of Pop!_OS?
[ 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?
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.
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!
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
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.
Solid but occasionally buggy
COSMIC looks cool
Use it on my lenovo carbon x1 flawlessly. Love it.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
The UI seemed like it wasted a lot of space. I hope that Cosmic is better in that regard.
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
aptinstead. 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.
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.