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I love Pop!_OS. I have used Gentoo, Ubuntu and Arch in the past 10 years. I ended up with Antergos packaged version of Arch with a bunch of personal tweaks. I t

I love Pop!_OS. I have used Gentoo, Ubuntu and Arch in the past 10 years. I ended up with Antergos packaged version of Arch with a bunch of personal tweaks. I tried different distro every now and then but always ended disappointed. My only needs for distros are to install softwares I use and run them. It turns out to be significantly hard, none of the distros do that without glitches, screen tearing and inconsistency across GUI frameworks. Surely I can tweak them to my liking, but the rabbit hole goes very deep until it comes to a satisfying result. Pop!_OS is the first OS that stay out of the way, I barely notice the existence of OS, and neither do I want to tweak it, and that is the way I want from a distro. The workspace arranging and switching is a nice touch, making it feel like home for tiling window manager users, coming from i3wm, xmonad or whatsnot. I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works. Pop!_OS provides by far the closest experience I get.

dxxvi 7y ago
Lucky you because there's an OS that tweaks everything to your liking. The fact that Pop!_OS is not a rolling distro might be a big - for many people.
- tonysickpony 7y ago
  Fair point. I enjoy rolling release model too. Some times I hope Pop!_OS and Elementary were not based on Ubuntu at the first place.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  Rolling distributions simply do not provide the stability for serious production environments.
  - scandox 7y ago
    Is a desktop a production environment?
    - Intermernet 7y ago
      If you make your money using your desktop, then yes it is.
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      Time is always money one way or another. Time is ever so precious. Even if you disagree, if a pentester uses Kali Linux (a Debian-based rolling release distribution), and they get paid for it, yes. Even then, Kali Linux regularly breaks, so a solution is to run it on VMs with snapshots (or communicate to each other when it breaks, or use a microSD card for a working version). There's also a clear advantage: you get the newest versions of software much quicker than an OS which updates every half year (or a LTS version which gets updated less often).
codetrotter 7y ago
> I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works. Same here. For me the answer was KDE Neon. I have like one or two grievances with KDE Neon currently. One of them being that OBS Studio often stops responding when I try to exit it. But for my use-cases KDE Neon has been the best desktop experience I have had in the 10 years since I switched to exclusively using Linux and FreeBSD. Along the way I have gone through a few different distros.
- tonysickpony 7y ago
  Nice pick. I think we went down different path in the maze of linux distroes. But I'm glad you find something you find fit. I like KDE base softwares better than gnome based counterparts.
jaabe 7y ago
> I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works. This is why I became a Mac user. After 15 years of Linux I was just done with all the bullshit, but I guess I could look into Pop!_OS.
- simula67 7y ago
  This is probably why the 'Year of the Linux Desktop' never arrived. The introduction of Macs probably crippled the Linux desktop market. Without Macs companies like System76 would probably have been more successful as more developers demand a good quality Unix compatible machine.
  - alrs 7y ago
    System76 would have never happened, Dell and HP were already pushing Linux before OSX dropped. In the year 2000: https://www.zdnet.com/article/dell-linuxs-new-best-friend-5000112307/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/dell-linuxs-new-best-friend-50...
- baroffoos 7y ago
  I have found fedora to be the just works distro as long as you pick the right hardware to start. A dell XPS + fedora has been the most productive setup I have ever had.
  - v_lisivka 7y ago
    Yeah, Dell XPS + Fedora works great together. I actually started to use Bluetooth with Dell. It just works.
  - boomskats 7y ago
    Second this, and add 'every thinkpad I've ever owned' to your hardware caveat.
    - baroffoos 7y ago
      My coworkers are leaning towards dell+fedora since every one at the company who has got one of the newer macbooks has had the keyboard fail repeatedly.
deanclatworthy 7y ago
Forgive me for asking, but what is different about this than Ubuntu 19.04? I looked through the POP!_OS (terrible name btw) promo page [1] and the majority of the things it's talking about are basic Gnome features shipped with Ubuntu? [1] https://system76.com/pop https://system76.com/pop
- ekianjo 7y ago
  mostly custom icon pack and the inclusion of nvidia drivers by default. Seems to work out of the box with laptops with nvidia cards
- tonysickpony 7y ago
  That's a good question. Unfortunately I can't do System76 and Ubuntu guys justice here because I really don't know the work has been done in both distros. From the user perspective, I would say smoother hardware integration (I download the ISO with NVIDIA proprietary drivers, haven't encountered any graphic card comparability problem), consistent theme across gtk and qt based applications , saner defaults and clearer setting structure, good keyboard shortcuts. There are merely less than a dozen shortcuts that are not found in Ubuntu, but very easy to get used to. like win + up/down to switch between workspace. I know all these can be accomplished by extensions, add-ons and themes. But they do feel different when it is out of the box and carefully curated.
- bwat49 7y ago
  https://github.com/pop-os/docs/blob/master/docs/difference-between-pop-ubuntu.md https://github.com/pop-os/docs/blob/master/docs/difference-b...
- pknopf 7y ago
  It doesn't really add anything. It does however, break things. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/503481/why-does-apt-file-report-the-cache-is-empty-even-after-running-apt-file-updat?noredirect=1#comment953173_503481 https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/503481/why-does-apt... I would steer clear of it unless it actually provides anything other than a default nvidia setup.
vagab0nd 7y ago
Personally I can say the same thing for Arch Linux. Since you've used both, could you elaborate what is better in Pop!_OS than Arch?

dxxvi 7y ago

Lucky you because there's an OS that tweaks everything to your liking. The fact that Pop!_OS is not a rolling distro might be a big - for many people.

tonysickpony 7y ago
Fair point. I enjoy rolling release model too. Some times I hope Pop!_OS and Elementary were not based on Ubuntu at the first place.
Fnoord 7y ago
Rolling distributions simply do not provide the stability for serious production environments.
- scandox 7y ago
  Is a desktop a production environment?
  - Intermernet 7y ago
    If you make your money using your desktop, then yes it is.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    Time is always money one way or another. Time is ever so precious. Even if you disagree, if a pentester uses Kali Linux (a Debian-based rolling release distribution), and they get paid for it, yes. Even then, Kali Linux regularly breaks, so a solution is to run it on VMs with snapshots (or communicate to each other when it breaks, or use a microSD card for a working version). There's also a clear advantage: you get the newest versions of software much quicker than an OS which updates every half year (or a LTS version which gets updated less often).

codetrotter 7y ago

> I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works. Same here. For me the answer was KDE Neon. I have like one or two grievances with KDE Neon currently. One of them being that OBS Studio often stops responding when I try to exit it. But for my use-cases KDE Neon has been the best desktop experience I have had in the 10 years since I switched to exclusively using Linux and FreeBSD. Along the way I have gone through a few different distros.

tonysickpony 7y ago
Nice pick. I think we went down different path in the maze of linux distroes. But I'm glad you find something you find fit. I like KDE base softwares better than gnome based counterparts.

jaabe 7y ago

> I don't have any obsession with distros. I want one that works. This is why I became a Mac user. After 15 years of Linux I was just done with all the bullshit, but I guess I could look into Pop!_OS.

simula67 7y ago
This is probably why the 'Year of the Linux Desktop' never arrived. The introduction of Macs probably crippled the Linux desktop market. Without Macs companies like System76 would probably have been more successful as more developers demand a good quality Unix compatible machine.
- alrs 7y ago
  System76 would have never happened, Dell and HP were already pushing Linux before OSX dropped. In the year 2000: https://www.zdnet.com/article/dell-linuxs-new-best-friend-5000112307/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/dell-linuxs-new-best-friend-50...
baroffoos 7y ago
I have found fedora to be the just works distro as long as you pick the right hardware to start. A dell XPS + fedora has been the most productive setup I have ever had.
- v_lisivka 7y ago
  Yeah, Dell XPS + Fedora works great together. I actually started to use Bluetooth with Dell. It just works.
- boomskats 7y ago
  Second this, and add 'every thinkpad I've ever owned' to your hardware caveat.
  - baroffoos 7y ago
    My coworkers are leaning towards dell+fedora since every one at the company who has got one of the newer macbooks has had the keyboard fail repeatedly.

deanclatworthy 7y ago

Forgive me for asking, but what is different about this than Ubuntu 19.04? I looked through the POP!_OS (terrible name btw) promo page [1] and the majority of the things it's talking about are basic Gnome features shipped with Ubuntu? [1] https://system76.com/pop https://system76.com/pop

ekianjo 7y ago
mostly custom icon pack and the inclusion of nvidia drivers by default. Seems to work out of the box with laptops with nvidia cards
tonysickpony 7y ago
That's a good question. Unfortunately I can't do System76 and Ubuntu guys justice here because I really don't know the work has been done in both distros. From the user perspective, I would say smoother hardware integration (I download the ISO with NVIDIA proprietary drivers, haven't encountered any graphic card comparability problem), consistent theme across gtk and qt based applications , saner defaults and clearer setting structure, good keyboard shortcuts. There are merely less than a dozen shortcuts that are not found in Ubuntu, but very easy to get used to. like win + up/down to switch between workspace. I know all these can be accomplished by extensions, add-ons and themes. But they do feel different when it is out of the box and carefully curated.
bwat49 7y ago
https://github.com/pop-os/docs/blob/master/docs/difference-between-pop-ubuntu.md https://github.com/pop-os/docs/blob/master/docs/difference-b...
pknopf 7y ago
It doesn't really add anything. It does however, break things. https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/503481/why-does-apt-file-report-the-cache-is-empty-even-after-running-apt-file-updat?noredirect=1#comment953173_503481 https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/503481/why-does-apt... I would steer clear of it unless it actually provides anything other than a default nvidia setup.

vagab0nd 7y ago

Personally I can say the same thing for Arch Linux. Since you've used both, could you elaborate what is better in Pop!_OS than Arch?