Pop OS – System76

Pop is my new favorite. I started using it at the urging of friends, and love it. I&#x27;ve written a couple reviews of it on my blog, as it&#x27;s been my &quot;daily driver&quot; for my laptop for nearly a year.<p>I&#x27;ve been a Linux user since 1995&#x2F;96, and a die hard Arch user for about 10 years. So why would I want a Linux distro that&#x27;s super hands-off and easy to use?<p>It&#x27;s incredibly stable. &quot;Set it and forget it&quot;. If I want a bleeding edge version of software I can add it. It&#x27;s performant, easy, and all my hardware works. It really just &quot;stays out of my way&quot; so I can get work done instead of tinkering. It&#x27;s nice.<p>I still keep an Arch install around, but when I want to fire up a laptop and get to work without a single problem, Pop has been fantastic for it. I recommend it to new users, as well as old neckbeards like me.

A bit of a sidenote:<p>PopOS came installed on my system76 laptop. But that&#x27;s not important here.<p>What intrigues me more is that the laptop had terrible battery life. And I mean terrible by even 2010 standards. And I bought it in 2018. It would last less than an hour on average, and less than 40 minutes if I was doing something demanding.<p>I use past term &quot;had&quot; as although I am still using this laptop today, somehow after 3 years, it&#x27;s battery life has just increased dramatically and completely out of the blue.<p>Somehow I can now use it for over three hours while running off battery life. I&#x27;ve been pretty confused as to how this has happened, and am now wondering if anyone with a system76 might have experienced something similar.<p>I&#x27;m really hoping it will go up to nine hours by 2024. It&#x27;s a great laptop.

I&#x27;ve been a Windows user since the days you typed &quot;win&quot; to start it from DOS and I still manange a small Windows network for a manufacturer in Wisconsin. Last year I finally had enough from Microsoft and made the switch to Pop OS for my daily driver. I haven&#x27;t looked back. It&#x27;s a wonderful distro and I&#x27;m amazed at how far Linux has come since it&#x27;s early days in the 90s. Kudos to the System 76 team.

As far as I&#x27;m concerned, this is the current gold standard for out-of-box experience desktop Linux.<p>There are things I would do differently if I were building a system myself, but PopOS &quot;Just Works&quot;, and is more polished than Win10 imho.

If you&#x27;re interested in the tiling features of Pop OS, they&#x27;re also available as a standalone extension for GNOME Shell. Very little friction to test them out (if you&#x27;re already running GNOME).<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pop-os&#x2F;shell" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pop-os&#x2F;shell</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.system76.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;pop-shell&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.system76.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;pop-shell&#x2F;</a>

I am still searching for a replacement of Ubuntu. snap store not being open source made was enough for me after nearly 10 years.<p>Well, not so much for myself. I can handle Arch and whatnot. I am a distro hopper, although a somewhat slow one. Used i3 for years and should probably go back (or to sway). But for family members and relatives whose machines I install and support. Is Pop OS a reasonable candidate for that? The main problem with Ubuntu these days is that I have to tell them sorry no Chromium. If a school&#x27;s e-learning system does not work with Firefox (or the teacher believes so) that&#x27;s a problem.

The worst thing about Pop OS is the official styling of its name. &quot;Pop!_OS&quot;, who came up with this?

I daily drive Pop OS on my Thinkpad and love it. It’s just… easy. Everything works out of the box and it’s a nice reliable system for general usage.<p>I used to be all about Arch and heavily modified OSes refined down to minute detail but these days I just want the OS to stay out of my way and let me get my work done, and that’s exactly what Pop OS is good for.

It was all shiny and nice until I started using it.<p>I stopped using Pop OS. I am using Linux Mint and I am very happy with it.<p>The main problem of the OS was its very poor power management. With Kubuntu&#x2F;Mint, I get about 5.5 hours of battery backup from my laptop and when using Pop, I barely got 3. Yes, I get more than two hours more from using Kubuntu&#x2F;Mint rather than Pop.<p>The wifi was problematic. I tried common fixes and they did not work. Internet was (testedly) slow always compared to other devices on the same network.<p>These are the main reasons why I decided to leave Pop OS. And then there are those problems which you get from using Linux distros in everyday life. They existed for Pop. This sounds vague. But things go wrong often. Regular Linux users will know.<p>Another major issue I must mention is freezing and outright crashing when the Pop Shop is launched. Installing something new was a costly endeavour. It was also a key factor in my decision to leave PopOS.<p>I have found Linux Mint to be the most usable, lowest maintenance distro out there (Arch requiring the highest maintenance). But I wanted my personal machine to look nice, so I tried Kubuntu, and I like it. I am not going back to Pop.<p>So it&#x27;s Ubuntu (workstation) + Kubuntu &#x2F; Mint (personal laptop) for me.

I&#x27;m confused.<p>A lot of people here coming from Windows and other Linux distros seem to appreciate how easy to use and out of the way is Pop OS.<p>And that&#x27;s exactly how I&#x27;d describe my experience with Ubuntu proper.<p>Can someone who made the transition from Ubuntu to Pop OS tell us how big a difference there are between the two flavors?

Wrote a detailed post about my move from macOS to Ubuntu (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kvz.io&#x2F;tobuntu.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kvz.io&#x2F;tobuntu.html</a>), and so many seemingly experienced users commented I should try Pop!OS.<p>Now some Ubuntu releases and issues and HN threads like these later, I’m ready to give it a go. Will be installing it this holiday

Have been using Pop OS as my daily driver on an i3 NUC10 for the past 9 months and i&#x27;ve got to say the experience has been relatively smooth. The only issues i&#x27;ve encountered so far are the occasional screen flickering when i run the android emulator and printing.<p>But funny enough I&#x27;m able to put up with these little inconveniences because after all it&#x27;s a free OS. I find myself to be much more tolerant than when I was using MacOS and my macbook pro. Between the dead keys, apple tax, dongle life and the OS quirks ...

This is funny, I am literally in the middle of writing an ISO of this OS to a USB stick to try installing on my laptop. I&#x27;ve been trying to find a good linux distro for a &quot;2-in-1&quot; laptop that has a stylus (Surface, Yoga, etc.)... Pop!_OS came up as a strong contender in discussions&#x2F;posts I could find online. Guess I&#x27;ll find out shortly! :)

I switched to Pop OS from Ubuntu about a year ago, and I love it. Stable, good battery life, everything just works. The auto-tiling works well, but what really made me faster was having dedicated keyboard shortcuts for specific apps.<p>For instance, Win+1 switches immediately to the open terminal window, and if it’s not already open, it opens it. Win+2 is the same for VS Code opened to the repo I work in most frequently. Win+3 for chrome, +4 for a text editor, etc. For comfort, on keyboards that don’t have a Win key on the right side, right ctrl gets rebound to that.<p>I don’t even need the dock anymore, because 95% of the time I’m switching between just a few apps. Alt+tab works for the remaining 5%.

Hey system76 if you&#x27;re reading this the keys vault has various crashy behavior with different kids of ssh keys. I believe I took a putty exported openssh key and I could not import it via the UI. It&#x27;s the underlying service that&#x27;s buggy iirc. There&#x27;s an existing open issue for it that I cannot find at this moment.

I love Pop OS, sadly I had to replace it with Ubuntu on my main laptop with an Nvidia graphics card because of some random crashes where it would close my session and the screen would turn gray with no way to get back from that without rebooting.<p>I&#x27;ve tried everything and I couldn&#x27;t fix it. Now I&#x27;m on Ubuntu missing it every day.

I have tried installing Pop!_OS 21.04 on 2 distinct models of computers - it would fail silently (the installation process sort of ends suspiciously quickly, then it won&#x27;t boot) so I had to use Ubuntu instead (it still installs and boots without any problems). Pop!_OS 20.10 worked fine.

I installed Pop OS on my Thinkpad after an OS update on Ubuntu started causing battery drain during suspend.<p>It did fix the battery drain issue. It also had good hybrid graphics support out of the box. I tried their tiling manager for a bit but switched back to i3.

[edit] Pop OS made my macbook air 2012 usable and it became a delight to hack on Rust even given the hw limitations. Their attention to detail on top of a distro that I already respect for that is awesome. Long live Pop OS.

I’ve never tried Pop!_OS but I hear such good things about it from people that have that’s it’s on my rainy day list of things to have a toy with. That and NixOS - but for very different reasons.

I&#x27;ve been using Pop OS as my daily driver for several years now on my desktop with Nvidia videocard. Never before have I experienced such a stable Linux distro.

The only thing I haven&#x27;t liked about Pop!_OS in my two years of daily driving has been the name. I think they need to rebrand as 76OS or something a little more professional. But that&#x27;s so subjective.<p>Oh and I hope they make a laptop with a trackpoint eventually! I know that&#x27;s the one thing preventing me from making the switch to their HW.

Wow, I&#x27;m currently writing a USB drive with the 21.10 beta, considering switching from Ubuntu.<p>If I keep using it I&#x27;ll support them. I want a company that cares about desktop Linux to succeed. For all the good they&#x27;ve done (and that Pop is building on), Canonical don&#x27;t seem to give a stuff about consumer desktop Linux anymore.

I switched from xubuntu to pop about two months ago and generally have a good time using it. I like the tiling wm and had to configure very little and except for the crappy WiFi stick everything worked out of the box.<p>Being the idiot that I am I thought I wouldn&#x27;t need a swap file and now everytime my ram is full my system freezes entirely.

Writing this on my 12 year old HP Pavilion 23 all-in-one running Pop as a bedside device for streaming video and audio books. It&#x27;s smooth and responsive even with multiple videos running and flipping between browser tabs.

I really love the company and use Pop OS. The only thing I would really love for them to do is focus on ZFS out of box experience.<p>Having the default encryption go Native ZFS encryption would be really great.

I use a Meerkat as my media&#x2F;tv&#x2F;PiHole&#x2F;CCTV&#x2F;NAS connection, and PopOS is a really great TV OS, I can&#x27;t rate it enough.

it&#x27;s like ubuntu but with little things changes here and there.<p>good thing is they are all the things that I wanted to change about ubuntu :D

Is this Debian- Arch- or what?

This tiling feature looks just like i3 or Sway.. pretty sure it is using it under the hood. Not sure why they changed the default shortcuts though, nor why they want to rename everything under the Pop OS brand.. rather than just give credit to the real contributors.