Pop OS 20.04 LTS

I got sick of waiting for Apple to fix their keyboards and built myself a custom Ryzen-based desktop. I chose to install PopOS 19.10 on it and it has been great. I plan on waiting a few weeks to upgrade to 20.04 and will then probably stay on that version until the next LTS release.<p>I never used Ubuntu as my daily driver so it is hard to say what is better, but PopOS has been great and has good defaults. It was not hard to adjust despite having used OSX for the previous 12 years. I work from home 95% of the time so working on a desktop was an option and I still have my old 15&quot; Macbook from work around when I need to travel to the office. I will probably just get it upgraded when Apple refreshes the 13&quot; Pro.<p>Anyway, +1 for PopOS and you do not have to run System76 hardware to use it.

After being disappointed with Ubuntu&#x27;s move towards snapification of apt packages (apt-get install chromium installs the snap, lxd is snap only now) along with my growing unhappiness with Canonical way of doing things I have been thinking about another distro. I would prefer to stay on a Debian based distro so PopOS looks promising.<p>Can anyone answer the following?<p>Does Pop inherit Ubuntus snapifictation with 20.04?<p>Do they release newer kernels for the LTS releases like Canonical does with Ubuntu LTS?<p>Do they pack ZFS in the kernel like Ubuntu?

I think Pop!_OS offers the most solid experience of Linux on desktops today. Apart from the lack of proprietary codecs by default (I know there are licensing issues, still I missed it), the default settings are pretty good. I reserved a whole day to set it up when I decided to install it, but right after the installation it felt ready to work, just needed to install some things and transfer my stuff.<p>Their decision to support Flatpak by default, to create a recovery partition which allows the user to reinstall the system without losing data (in a no-brainer way), and their overall attention to detail won me over. Kudos to the team for creating this distro and making it available for other computer brands.<p>Edit: typo.

Neat, on the bottom of the page there is a switch that changes all screenshots to Dark Mode (to demonstrate the OS&#x27;s feature).<p>But the neat part is that in the &quot;Gaming&quot; card, it swaps Firewatch (a game&#x2F;movie-with-buttons notorious for its gorgeous daylight scenes) to Elite: Dangerous (a game set in space, which is pretty visually dark).<p>If the same attention to detail is present in the OS design itself, it&#x27;s bound to be some good.

And FYI they just released a new version of the Lemur Pro 14 laptop with a gigantic 74 Wh battery. I pre-ordered one and got it a few weeks ago and am on it now with 40 GB of RAM. I had been waiting for the high-RAM Dell XPS 13 with linux but got sick of waiting and then this popped up. It&#x27;s astoundingly light and performant for its class. I absolutely love it.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;system76.com&#x2F;laptops&#x2F;lemur" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;system76.com&#x2F;laptops&#x2F;lemur</a>

I wish there was a straightforward way to take the diff of all the Ubuntu variants. Ostensibly one could take Ubuntu and run a few shell scripts (I am grossly oversimplifying) and boom you are now running Pop.<p>So much time and effort goes into building an _entire_ distribution when, at the core, 90% or more of the thing is identical to Ubuntu LTS. Am I missing something?<p>Also... the name with the exclamation and the underscores is one of the most user hostile and nonsensical things I have ever seen in open source, since brainfuck the language.

I really like what System76 is doing by catering to power users and developers. However I think that long-term Ubuntu is not an ideal base, and I would prefer a rolling-release distribution with minimal packages, a good ports system and the latest kernel. I know a lot of people have experience with debian based distributions, but Debian is really not the best distro if you want to customize things or have a relatively rare toolchain (common for developers). All the debian specific changes are akin to small papercuts that really make for an unpleasant experience over time.<p>When you think about it, most developers use Mac OS with a ports system (brew), combined with Flatpack-like packaging for some big apps. I think this is what the Linux Desktop needs to emulate to get more market share. Linux definitely has a huge advantage by being able to run docker containers natively.

I&#x27;ve been pleasantly surpised with Pop OS. I&#x27;d been a Xubuntu user for nearly 10 years but have switched to Pop because of all the work they&#x27;ve put into hybrid graphics. I like XFCE more but Pop just has so many other good things going for it: auto-tiling, flatpak, hardware support, etc. In fact, my next laptop will probably be System76 Lemur Pro instead of my usual Thinkpad.

So glad that they&#x27;re bringing tiling features, keyboard shortcuts and workspaces front and center!<p>Quick glance and looks like it&#x27;s bringing together the best of tiling WMs with the polish of Pop!_OS.

If you have a discrete nvidia card and don&#x27;t want to deal with extra scripts and configurations, this is the way to go, everything works out of the box, or even if don&#x27;t it&#x27;s a quality distro

I downloaded the beta a week ago, and was very impressed. I love the auto-tiling. I&#x27;ve been trying to get into that for a while, but never found it polished enough. This is a fantastic implementation, that doesn&#x27;t require you to memorize all of the keyboard combos to get started.<p>I&#x27;m very torn about flatpack versus snaps versus debian. This fragmentation is awful.<p>I&#x27;d like to see a ZFS (with encryption) default soon as well.

So excited, PopOS is by far my favorite distribution. It all started with getting a Darter Pro from work, but now I run it on my personal laptop too.<p>I’ll be upgrading from 18.04, so I hope to see a lot of new stuff. Finger crossesed, without much hiccups.

I am tempted to get their new lemur pro as my next machine, but I don&#x27;t have enough impression of the build quality.<p>I am used to mac and thinkpads, and one thing I used to enjoy was the x200 keyboard along with the trackpoint and 3 mousebuttons in reach from the thumb, does lenovo hold a patent for this, or is there any reason this type of cursor input is so rarely seen?<p>I&#x27;d gladly pay a premium for the option to get a more ergonomic keyboard.

I am new to Pop, just installed over top Ubuntu (uptime 61d, I shed a tear).<p>Pop is great. The mouse feels better (but I can&#x27;t increase scroll rate?), the window manager keys are so sane. I just realized you can turn on Emacs input for the keyboard, so C-a always means home (like os x!?).<p>I went to the Pop website [1] to get codecs working (Twitch), super easy.<p>A Ryzen + Pop!_OS is my new &quot;Mac Pro&quot;, to replace my 2010 5,1 model. I recommend it, having used distros from Red Hat 9 to Mint&#x2F;Ubuntu to Gentoo to Slackware.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.system76.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;codecs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.system76.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;codecs&#x2F;</a>

Just watched their tiling window managed demo: neat! I am going to steal some ideas from it for my tiling WM for Windows (hope they don&#x27;t mind!).

Hahaha, just this morning I&#x27;d made a 19.10 live USB to re-install PopOS on my desktop. If only I had procrastinated a little longer...

For my own reference and for anybody who just Googled it, the SHA256 hash of pop-os_20.04_amd64_intel_5.iso is 5478241142930dbd95143773d53be079087024d3112614a901edc2829040f996, verified using GPG key 63C46DF0140D738961429F4E204DD8AEC33A7AFF.<p>Do your own verification as well!

I upgraded last night and it feels like the fonts are better. My screen seems to be more clear and easier to read.<p>Hopefully they&#x27;ve also fixed the problem where Firefox causes massive periodic disk I&#x2F;O which freezes my whole computer for minutes on end.

Wow, took me all of 3 minutes to break it. Windows share browsing is completely broken :(<p>I even got the OS to get stuck with modal requestors that you can&#x27;t dismiss.<p>SMB browsing is the first thing I try on a new distribution, because it&#x27;s almost always broken.

Is the ZFS root partition support there?

If only I could get my crappy USB Realtek Wifi to work with this I would switch. I tried for a few days to no luck. I definitely appreciate that they ship Nvidia drivers.

System76 if you&#x27;re reading this, please hire a new design team that is on par with Apple, Google, IBM, etc. and a new industrial design team that has competence at the level of Bang &amp; Olufsen, Apple, Braun, etc. System76 has such a huge potential but their marketing and design is lacking severely.<p>You guys need to realize that great companies such as Apple have a certain design ethos(some people resonate with it and some don&#x27;t, but they have a very strong design language) and it comes from the top-down. Steve Jobs had a deep sense of appreciation for Japanese architecture, IBM in the 60&#x27;s had hired Elliot Noyes, and Braun was aesthetically lead by Dieter Rams. IBM Thinkpads had hired IDEO design and bunch of high class firms to design their products. Nikon hired Pinin Ferrina. Study the history of hardware companies and what made them great.<p>System76 has the potential to be the most amazing linux-based computer company in the world - but they don&#x27;t have the right type of leadership. Leadership needs to have good &quot;taste&quot;.