5 Years of Pop _OS

I&#x27;m a Linux idiot, just got sick of Windows, and took the plunge in 2016. (After some ill-fated tinkering in 1996 with Slackware, but we don&#x27;t speak of that.) I started with Ubuntu and had a pretty good time for a year or two, until a dist-upgrade broke everything. Luckily &#x2F;home&#x2F; was easy to restore from backup.<p>So I was fine for another two years on Ubuntu until another dist-upgrade broke everything again. Sensing a pattern, I decided to give Pop a try.<p>I&#x27;m now about a year into Pop and sure enough, a few weeks ago a dist-upgrade broke a lot of things, but unlike Ubuntu, I was able to find System76&#x27;s tech support page, I ran the commands it suggested, and everything&#x27;s fine again!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.system76.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;package-manager-ubuntu&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.system76.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;package-manager-ubuntu...</a><p>Miraculous, I tell you.<p>I still can&#x27;t figure out why there are multiple versions of some things in the Pop Shop, but they all seem to work, so I&#x27;m not complaining, it&#x27;s just weird. Someday I&#x27;ll figure out this whole tiling-windows thing, but I think that&#x27;s for people with bigger screens so I turned it off so my alt-tab reflexes work again.<p>In general, it just works, and that&#x27;s more than I can say for Windows or Ubuntu at this point.

I really like Pop Os. I&#x27;ve always liked Debian descended distros, and prior to this I was using Ubuntu. While I like it, I always found a lot of rough edges esp. when it came to proprietary drivers, etc. where things didn&#x27;t always work without some tweaking. Pop Os on the other hand seems to &quot;just work&quot; - it is like a polished version of Ubuntu with a nice selection of apps in the Pop Shop. Theme is pretty nice as well as a bonus.

I am quite a fan of their Pop!_Shell. I wanted to improve my desktop efficiency by using a tiling window manager; I tried i3wm and XMonad, but none of them really clicked with me. Finally, I decided to try the Pop!_Shell tiling mode and it was awesome. (Hardcore tiling window manager fans might not agree but Pop!_Shell is a lot more newbie-friendly.)<p>Furthermore, you don&#x27;t even have to install Pop!_OS to get Pop!_Shell. For example my preferred distribution is openSUSE Tumbleweed with GNOME, so I just need to<p><pre><code> sudo zypper install gnome-shell-extension-pop-shell wget https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pop-os&#x2F;shell&#x2F;raw&#x2F;master_jammy&#x2F;scripts&#x2F;configure.sh # configure.sh mostly configures keyboard shortcuts. Inspect it before running. sh .&#x2F;configure.sh </code></pre> And then enable it. That&#x27;s all.

It sounds like they are taking a big bet on rewriting large components of the OS custom for Pop OS in Rust. I wish them the best but it sounds like a big commitment and I’m holding my breath for them to succeed.<p>I’m curious how System76 sees Pop_OS fitting into their business model which is primarily hardware.

Pop OS is great, specially their system76-power package, which allows my Nvidia Optimus based laptop to run just fine. I prefer running KDE Plasma, so I&#x27;m using Kubuntu these days, I would love to see a Plasma spin-off of Pop, but I won&#x27;t blame them if they prefer to stick to Gnome only and focus on consistency.

Been a happy Pop!_OS user since seeing it recommended here on HN.<p>I feel like its polish combined with its hardline stance against snaps makes it an easy choice to switch to for Ubuntu users.

i am not happy with my galago pro.<p>system76 is a name that often comes up when you ask about linux laptops. so i decided to try their galago pro. and i have to be honest here. as a long time macbook user, this is definitely a downgrade for the price. especially when you can get an M1 and a better experience for the same price.<p>the trackpad is weird and does not work well. i apply too much pressure for my clicks to register. my taps, however, would register with me barely touching the pad, or finger scrolling. i have disabled tapping. and natural scrolling does not feel natural.<p>now, having page-up and page-down keys above the left and right arrow keys is a bad idea. it gives a bad user experience.<p>but of course, it&#x27;s linux, you can remap the keys. you need a handful of commands for that. and since you are on a custom OS, you need to look at the base OSes. lucky me, someone wrote a blog post for ubuntu.<p>system76&#x27;s discord is not (in my experience) where you get help. it is full of people who will ignore you. my impression is that they live in a bubble and are all doing similar things. you get the silent treatment for not doing things their way.<p>not sure what people are happy about with pop!_os. i spend my time looking through ubuntu and debian documentation. pop!_os docs are a series of articles and they are lacking. i am happy with what ubuntu and debian are doing! this custom OS does not make much difference in my opinion.<p>all that said, i will continue to support system76.

Pop_OS was great with Pop_Shell. It was a very pleasant experience; it was not perfect but could be polished.<p>But they got NIH* syndrome and started this COSMIC desktop; UI changed, the whole experience changed, more bugs ruin our lives. And then they got &quot;Let&#x27;s rebuild everything in Rust&quot; fever and the great experience of Pop_OS + Pop_Shell was lost forever.<p>I understand the needs of creating unique experience for a product, but they could have built their desktop on top of Gnome like Ubuntu is doing or using the Gnome stack like Cinnamon, Elementary and many others. Or, if Gnome is a problem for them, they could have chosen the KDE stack, since KDE community is friendlier to outsiders.<p>* Not invented here

I&#x27;ve been meaning to fully switch to Linux on my desktop and laptop for some time, but I&#x27;m not the only person using them, so I had to account for that. After using Zorin OS for about 6-7 months (and paying for their pro version) I was having some difficulties with running games and drivers on it. I then tried out Pop Os on my desktop first and haven&#x27;t had any issues. Once I spent time tweaking the remaining settings that I liked in Zorin OS (win key + number to access dash apps) and a few other tweaks, I fully switched to Pop Os on the desktop and the laptop.<p>It&#x27;s been a few months and I must say that it&#x27;s what I&#x27;ve been looking for in a Linux distro. Something predictable, stable, that has good out of the box defaults and runs great for some games as well. For anyone looking to switch from Windows, I can&#x27;t recommend it enough. Anyone else using the desktop&#x2F;laptop also feel right at home starting up a few programs, editing a document or a picture and watching videos and pictures (that&#x27;s really what most average users do anyway). It&#x27;s also really great to be able to switch between tiling and non-tiling modes with one keyboard shortcut, which gives me a lot of the things I loved in i3wm&#x2F;regolith while keeping it usable for average Joe (I&#x27;ll never forget the confusion on the face of a friend opening up a picture and trying to resize the window as it was taking up half the screen next to Firefox).<p>Great job to the Pop Os team!

I liked pop_os for a while, but sadly gnome just freezes randomly on me now. I have seen it&#x27;s an issue that many others have. Hopefully it&#x27;s just my hardware or something and not indicative of a larger problem with the distro. When it is not crashing it&#x27;s quite nice!

Coincidentally, the System76 blog RSS feed started 404-ing about midnight CST last night.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.system76.com&#x2F;rss" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.system76.com&#x2F;rss</a><p>They don&#x27;t seem to have a replacement URL up.

Wow, has it is only been around for 5 years? Been using it for over 3. It&#x27;s very polished and runs fine on my ThinkPad.<p>Bluetooth sometimes won&#x27;t connect to some things, but that was true of Ubuntu too. And I&#x27;ve never really relied on it for much anyway as I always find it a bit of a crap shoot whether devices in general will see each other or pair. So no great loss.

I love Pop OS and have been using it for the past 4 years now. But I am not a fan of the System76 laptop build quality. The shipping was fast, the OS and hardware haven&#x27;t had any problems and the packaging is awesome. But the build quality comparing to my 2015 mac book pro is lacking. But I will probably buy system 76 again because I am so used to linux.

&gt;System76 first decided to develop an OS as a way to better shape our customers’ &gt;experiences and harmonize the software with our hardware<p>I dont like people saying that they have &quot;developed an OS&quot; when all they have done is to create derivative distribution of Ubuntu which itself rests on Debian.<p>How about:<p>&quot;&quot;&quot; We have created a great distribution of Linux and we have added some brand-new components to it and we think you will really like it.<p>We think it is the best distribution for our customers and a great distribution for new users<p>Since it is based upon the highly popular Ubuntu distribution a lot of experienced users will feel right at home as well. &quot;&quot;&quot;<p>I hope their work on (a fork?) of GNOME becomes great.<p>The bit about implementing NTP seems odd to me.

I tried Pop!_OS a few years ago and I really like their marketing and how they push Pop!_OS as a big name in the distro game.<p>The only thing I dislike is their shell, the ugly pastel colors are really off putting along with some weird design choices and it wasn&#x27;t very stable the last time I tried it a few years ago.<p>Makes me wonder why ZorinOS isn&#x27;t as popular even though it has existed for twice as long. Maybe because of a lacking hardware company behind it? I think ZorinOS is a more consumer friendly distro than Pop!_OS (which I consider a nerd distro) and might have a better chance at being accepted as a mainstream distro than the others I&#x27;ve tried.

Been a happy PopOS user on Thinkpad X1 Extreme for about 3 years now. Big fan

Pop was rock solid for me until it wasn’t. Wouldn’t recognize memory and throttled one of my NICs after I installed an NVidia card and drivers. Reinstalling didn’t help. Installed Ubuntu Budgie and has been smooth sailing since.<p>I love Linux but wish it wasn’t such a pain and required blowing up installs every so often. By contrast, not once have I had to blow up a Mac OS instance to stabilize it.

I have a Serval WS with Pop OS! using Cinnamon. Battery life sucks (~40 minutes) if I forget to turn off the discrete GPU. But without the discrete GPU, the battery life... still sucks at about 4 hours. Not bad for desktop-class hardware in a laptop form factor.<p>I had a loaner laptop briefly when the screen went out. Loaner laptop battery lasted all day. I don&#x27;t remember the model though

I left Ubuntu for pop_os for the 22.04 release, on a Thinkpad p14s. Whent well, except mouse crashed sometime when suspend (left click anavailable !) And video crashing (geometric pattern all over the display). I&#x27;m not sure I made the good choice.

I wonder if COSMIC will get packaged in other distros like Ubuntu or Fedora.

Are there any advantages of running Pop_Os instead of Ubuntu? I have an X1 Carbon Gen 9 and have had zero issues with 20.04 and latest upgrading to 22.04.

Just a happy Pop user- been rock solid for me for 3 years- the features they add are really seamless and well thought out. Congrats on 5 years!

And this is why the Linux desktop is domed to be a VM inside other OSes, or filled with Electron apps.<p>Gtk, Qt, XFCE, GNOME and KDE applications will look out of place in the new desktop, and most likely they will never create a Rust based set of frameworks that can match the above ones on features, development tooling, and extensibility points for desktop developers.

I have used Pop_os for the last year; it has enough bugs and wasted enough of my time that I finally switched to Windows just to see if I can put up with it; I&#x27;ll probably revert to Ubuntu in a few months. WSL2 makes windows more livable but it&#x27;s still janky.<p>I&#x27;m a nerd but that doesn&#x27;t mean I have time to mess with bugs.

I was happy with my two S76s but the keyboard wore out on both.

The additions Pop!_OS has made are nice and looking forward to upcoming COSMIC but still it&#x27;s basically an Ubuntu remix, right?

I&#x27;ve owned three System76 desktops.<p>Highly recommended if you want a Linux desktop computer.

Congrats! Pop_OS rebuilt in Rust?? Sounds pretty sweet.<p>Really wish I had enough money for a System76 PC. Go on there at least 10 times a year and build out a PC or two just to dream...<p>Sorry for abandoning my cart with ridiculous PC specs built for one of those hoodie wearing hackers in media photos.<p>Edit: I&#x27;m posting too fast so for the person commenting on what boards they use...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tech-docs.system76.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tech-docs.system76.com</a> - here is your answer.

I will translate that very surprising comment whom made my choice :<p>--start of comment--<p>[quote]does S76 announces they&#x27;re targetting to recreate their own desktop from scratcch, or they &quot;just modify things&quot; whom are not really good with the gnome desktop of today, keeping the rest (running GTK if Im well)? [&#x2F;quote]<p>Official communication(1) says &quot;we&#x27;re doing to do our own desktop because gnome extensions are too breakable&quot;. Indeed, Cosmic-desktop was until there a gnome modified, with extensions, whom can by definition(2) be bugged&#x2F;breaked&#x2F;misfunctionnal at each gnome update. This decision could be comprehensible for a company who install it on computers to sell.<p>But I think we might not forget the fuming writing(3) that Chris Davies published shortly afterwards. As explained, some S76 devs badmouth a bit regarding Gnome devs riding their bad reputation (not diserved at all imho) and of lost-minded nerds flooding the r&#x2F;gnome subreddit and comments on OMGubuntu. The announce of Cosmic being rewrited in Rust has been then shown as a divorce between S76 and gnome, on the exclusive wrongdoing of that last one. It personnaly a view whom makes me sick, as some people said it here already. Budgie said more or less the same thing announcing last december they will re-write their desktop environnment in ELF(4), accusing the GtK project of being running for the particular interests of Gnome[teams]. It&#x27;s very hard for me to see that as something else than a true and real bad faith. Few years earlier, Linux Mint and elementary, decided their own desktop environnment in replacement of Gnome, and the three projects has followed a distinct path while keeping a good harmony (and staying based on GTK!)<p>it&#x27;s very frustrating to see those quarrels blocking on the path of the linux desktop adoption, because it&#x27;s really about it : we&#x27;re not talking here about niche desktops like sway or lxqt, but about what can permit to a huge amount of users to emancipate of microsoft and Apple. If it&#x27;s still considered as a relevant idea.<p>1: omgubuntu.co.uk&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;system76-is-building-its-own-desktop-environment<p>2: wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monkey-Patch<p>3: linuxfr.org&#x2F;users&#x2F;anonyme&#x2F;liens&#x2F;system76-a-case-study-on-how-not-to-collaborate-with-upstream<p>blogs.gnome.org&#x2F;christopherdavis&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;10&#x2F;system76-how-not-to-collaborate&#x2F;<p>4: joshuastrobl.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;09&#x2F;14&#x2F;building-an-alternative-ecosystem&#x2F;<p>--end of comment--<p>this is the reason why, on my own, I litterally prefer LMDE, with openbsd and haiku to accompany.

I will translate that very surprising comment whom made my choice : --start of comment--<p>[quote]does S76 announces they&#x27;re targetting to recreate their own desktop from scratcch, or they &quot;just modify things&quot; whom are not really good with the gnome desktop of today, keeping the rest (running GTK if Im well)? [&#x2F;quote]<p>Official communication(1) says &quot;we&#x27;re doing to do our own desktop because gnome extensions are too breakable&quot;. Indeed, Cosmic-desktop was until there a gnome modified, with extensions, whom can by definition(2) be bugged&#x2F;breaked&#x2F;misfunctionnal at each gnome update. This decision could be comprehensible for a company who install it on computers to sell.<p>But I think we might not forget the fuming writing(3) that Chris Davies published shortly afterwards. As explained, some S76 devs badmouth a bit regarding Gnome devs riding their bad reputation (not diserved at all imho) and of lost-minded nerds flooding the r&#x2F;gnome subreddit and comments on OMGubuntu. The announce of Cosmic being rewrited in Rust has been then shown as a divorce between S76 and gnome, on the exclusive wrongdoing of that last one. It personnaly a view whom makes me sick, as some people said it here already. Budgie said more or less the same thing announcing last december they will re-write their desktop environnment in ELF(4), accusing the GtK project of being running for the particular interests of Gnome[teams]. It&#x27;s very hard for me to see that as something else than a true and real bad faith. Few years earlier, Linux Mint and elementary, decided their own desktop environnment in replacement of Gnome, and the three projects has followed a distinct path while keeping a good harmony (and staying based on GTK!)<p>it&#x27;s very frustrating to see those quarrels blocking on the path of the linux desktop adoption, because it&#x27;s really about it : we&#x27;re not talking here about niche desktops like sway or lxqt, but about what can permit to a huge amount of users to emancipate of microsoft and Apple. If it&#x27;s still considered as a relevant idea.<p>1: www.omgubuntu.co.uk&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;system76-is-building-its-own-desktop-environment<p>2: fr.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monkey-Patch<p>3: linuxfr.org&#x2F;users&#x2F;anonyme&#x2F;liens&#x2F;system76-a-case-study-on-how-not-to-collaborate-with-upstream<p>blogs.gnome.org&#x2F;christopherdavis&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;10&#x2F;system76-how-not-to-collaborate&#x2F;<p>4: joshuastrobl.com&#x2F;2021&#x2F;09&#x2F;14&#x2F;building-an-alternative-ecosystem&#x2F;<p>--end of comment--<p>this is the reason why, on my own, I litterally prefer LMDE, with openbsd and haiku to accompany.