16 ms·

Pop OS 20.04 LTS

269 points by jamieweb 6y ago

manaskarekar 6y ago
So glad that they're bringing tiling features, keyboard shortcuts and workspaces front and center! Quick glance and looks like it's bringing together the best of tiling WMs with the polish of Pop!_OS.
- linsomniac 6y ago
  As a long time i3 user, I'll admit the tiling looks pretty appealing. Trying to figure out what i3 gives me that the Pop OS tiling wouldn't. There are definitely a few things, but probably 95% of my workflow is there. I recently installed Ubuntu 18.04 and set up i3 via Regolith, and I'm trying to figure out if it's giving me anything other than a new set of keyboard shortcuts. But something about it seems a lot slower than a week ago before I upgraded from bare i3 on 18.04.
  - zdragnar 6y ago
    > Trying to figure out what i3 gives me that the Pop OS tiling wouldn't I don't know how other people use i3, but I didn't see anything about stacked / tabbed layouts. They've become so baked into my workflow that I can't use anything without them for my personal laptop, at least- work forces me to use macOS :(
    - jackpot51 6y ago
      We will be working on stacking support soon
      - zdragnar 6y ago
        That is wonderful news! I look forward to trying it out
whalesalad 6y ago
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. 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? 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.
- giancarlostoro 6y ago
  Thank you, I too find the name choice a bit thoughtless. I get it you wanted to be different. But that is a really hard to google for name. I would of preferred Sys76OS
  - thanksforfish 6y ago
    Seems OK. Google, Bing, and DDG all show the sys76 pop OS site when I search for just pop os. Searching for "how to burn a CD pop os" has less useful results than "how to burn a CD ubuntu", but I think that's a user base size issue, not a naming issue.
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    That would imply that it was a horrible old IBM thing. Though, to be honest, so does their company name.
- elagost 6y ago
  A heavy criticism of a lot of these ubuntu-based distros is "ubuntu + a custom PPA", but system76 does actually put in a lot of work into a custom kernel and some neat UI tweaks that make the OS on their hardware really well. They also have a firmware updater for their systems built into the settings program. The whole experience is a lot more refined than Ubuntu, I believe. It's a great OS for their machines, as well as any laptop with hybrid Intel/Nvidia graphics.
  - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Ingon 6y ago
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. I’ll be upgrading from 18.04, so I hope to see a lot of new stuff. Finger crossesed, without much hiccups.
cbHXBY1D 6y ago
I've been pleasantly surpised with Pop OS. I'd been a Xubuntu user for nearly 10 years but have switched to Pop because of all the work they'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.
- csdreamer7 6y ago
  As a Lemur 2012 and 2016 owner-I think you will be quite happy with it.
InTheArena 6y ago
I downloaded the beta a week ago, and was very impressed. I love the auto-tiling. I've been trying to get into that for a while, but never found it polished enough. This is a fantastic implementation, that doesn't require you to memorize all of the keyboard combos to get started. I'm very torn about flatpack versus snaps versus debian. This fragmentation is awful. I'd like to see a ZFS (with encryption) default soon as well.
fermienrico 6y ago
System76 if you'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 & Olufsen, Apple, Braun, etc. System76 has such a huge potential but their marketing and design is lacking severely. You guys need to realize that great companies such as Apple have a certain design ethos(some people resonate with it and some don'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'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. System76 has the potential to be the most amazing linux-based computer company in the world - but they don't have the right type of leadership. Leadership needs to have good "taste".
- camelCaseCamel 6y ago
  Yes and please release something like the Lemur Pro with a 4K or at least a WQHD display.
  - mcv 6y ago
    4K is overkill on a laptop. I recently got a 15" Thinkpad with a 4K screen, and while it looks gorgeous, I doubt I'd notice the difference with QHD. Though QHD is definitely an upgrade compared to FHD.
- Klonoar 6y ago
  I'll be the first in line to say that, in general, Linux/OSS-centric companies never get this right. But this is just such a strange thing to say: "System76 if you'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 & Olufsen, Apple, Braun, etc." That is not only absurdly expensive, it disregards the actual situation: open source work in general suffers from a lack of designers willing to be involved. If this was a simple thing to do, I'd wager System76 would have already done it. On a personal note, I'd much rather they get to a point where they're fashioning their own hardware... otherwise I'm staying on a Macbook, because I'm not going back to plastic shells. The software design can wait, it's not like it hasn't already done so for years.
chmk 6y ago
If you have a discrete nvidia card and don'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't it's a quality distro
- modzu 6y ago
  thats what i thought and was true for a while but ive found that always having the bleeding edge driver has led to a fair bit of instability. im back to debian and its solid. just add contrib and non free repos and nvidia-driver is there
markphip 6y ago
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. 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" Macbook from work around when I need to travel to the office. I will probably just get it upgraded when Apple refreshes the 13" Pro. Anyway, +1 for PopOS and you do not have to run System76 hardware to use it.
- derethanhausen 6y ago
  Did the graphics you chose have quality, easy to install drivers? Been thinking of doing something similar.
  - bgorman 6y ago
    If you have Intel or AMD graphics work perfectly under Linux. You don't even need to install drivers because they are shipped in the Kernel.
    - est31 6y ago
      There are kernel components of drivers as well as userspace components. But they are all available via package managers, so no need to install them.
    - blackfawn 6y ago
      Out of curiosity, do people have issues with Nvidia in Linux? I've seen similar sentiment in the past but I've never really noticed any issues with the nouveau (open source) driver. Due to CUDA work, I primarily use the proprietary drivers which work well too (other than an annoying suspend bug introduced in 18.04 and seemingly unfixed in 20.04)
acidburnNSA 6y ago
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's astoundingly light and performant for its class. I absolutely love it. https://system76.com/laptops/lemur https://system76.com/laptops/lemur
- teruakohatu 6y ago
  Looks great. Do you know how nicely their trackpads work? I wish there was an option with a Ryzen 4000 and discrete graphics card, but it is still really compelling and I would buy one in a heartbeat if it was not for the fact that I wouldn't be able to get it serviced in my country.
- gregwebs 6y ago
  That looks like it might be a decent quality build instead of a plastic piece of junk build quality I experienced 5 years ago. I have been using Dell with pre-installed Ubuntu since, but it is a little underwhelming and of course my audio isn't working now. I was looking towards a ThinkPad with Fedora for my next machine.
  - acidburnNSA 6y ago
    The build quality and hardware compatibility is really great. Strong hinges, good trackpad, nice feeling keyboard. There are a few quirks (e.g. with ghost keys) but the firmware people appear to be working on it (nice that I can subscribe to the issues on github).
  - freedomben 6y ago
    I've been doing the ThinkPad + Fedora now for a few years, and it's by far the best Linux experience I've ever had. I've had a system76 laptop (quite a few years ago now), Dell XPS/Precision, and some Acer, HP, etc. Unless/until Lenovo ruins the Thinkpad, that's what I'll continue to do. Current model Thinkpad T580 i7-8650U, 32GB RAM Fedora 31. Intel graphics.
bgorman 6y ago
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. 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.
- kitsunesoba 6y ago
  I would love to see a DE/distro that more closely emulates macOS. A lot of people will point to Gnome and especially elementary OS for this, but they're really only Mac-like in that they're not Win9x-inspired like most other DEs and take a few design cues from various Apple software (Gnome reminds me more of iOS, and elementaryOS feels distantly related to Mavericks-era macOS). Of course one can always cobble something together for their own use, whether that be so amalgamation of WM+associated utilities or hammering on KDE or XFCE until it kinda takes on the desired shape, but nothing can replace a purposefully designed, opinionated DE.
  - badsectoracula 6y ago
    A purposefully designed and opinionated DE cannot really exist without a purposefully designed and opinionated GUI framework, which is probably why Gtk is nowadays often called the "Gnome Tool Kit".
  - terhechte 6y ago
    Did you try deep in Linux?
- ubercow13 6y ago
  You might be able to use Nix as a kind of ‘homebrew for Debian’
kroltan 6y ago
Neat, on the bottom of the page there is a switch that changes all screenshots to Dark Mode (to demonstrate the OS's feature). But the neat part is that in the "Gaming" card, it swaps Firewatch (a game/movie-with-buttons notorious for its gorgeous daylight scenes) to Elite: Dangerous (a game set in space, which is pretty visually dark). If the same attention to detail is present in the OS design itself, it's bound to be some good.
plausible 6y ago
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. 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. Edit: typo.
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  There's a sentiment of flatpak being a community thing whereas snap being a case of Ubuntu NIH, but isn't flatpak as much a RedHat lock-in? Is there a technical reason to prefer flatpak over snap, or is the number/up-to-dateness of available apps a reason to prefer one over the other? The info at http://flatkill.org/ http://flatkill.org/ certainly is sobering with respect to actual security gained by application sandboxing. I'd really hate into being drawn into another energy-consuming VHS-vs-Betamax or BD-vs-HDDVD drama. I'd much prefer a single statically linked binary if at all possible (though it may not be given that browsers or browser runtimes on which many modern "apps"/packages are based have accumulated way too much crap over the years, which I think is the actual problem).
  - Sammi 6y ago
    The bikeshedding over snap vs flatpack by some people is a huge drain on any conversations on Ubuntu these days. Snaps work fine. Flatpack works fine. Both solve real problems that people have that the old ways of doing packages didn't solve.
    - intpx 6y ago
      Except with Snaps its a pain in the absolute ass to give an application access to anything that it wasn't shipped with access to. The whole interface paradigm sucks. With flatpaks its easy. That being said, I still think both of them are not nearly as good as the old way of packaging-- I want software that doesn't hide all of its dependencies (and thus vulnerabilities) from me by default. If the linux world could pull their head out of their asses on the desktop environment wars, neither would even be needed. Though I wills say, both are better than electron apps.
deadbunny 6y ago
After being disappointed with Ubuntu'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. Can anyone answer the following? Does Pop inherit Ubuntus snapifictation with 20.04? Do they release newer kernels for the LTS releases like Canonical does with Ubuntu LTS? Do they pack ZFS in the kernel like Ubuntu?
- Shared404 6y ago
  I can't speak for the lower two questions, but Pop has gone the other direction on snaps. The default method of app installation is apt, but if that is unavailable, it will use flatpak from flathub.
  - deadbunny 6y ago
    Good to know, thanks for replying!
  - thekyle 6y ago
    That's good to hear. I do prefer Flatpaks to snaps since they don't auto update and you can have multiple repos.
  - camjohnson26 6y ago
    They have the Pop shop too, which seems to do something that’s not apt, haven’t had good luck with that, the versions are often out of date.
- noisem4ker 6y ago
  How would you describe the "Canonical way of doing things"?
  - jdub 6y ago
    Choosing to do their own thing instead of helping define and adopt the development community consensus approach, spewing FUD and criticism of the community for 2 or 3 years, then finally giving up and adopting what the rest of the community did in the first place.
Engineer2Throw 6y ago
Has anyone disabled mouse acceleration? This has been my difficulty with Linux desktop
lostmsu 6y ago
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't mind!).
- isantop 6y ago
  If we minded, it wouldn't be open source. ;)
redisman 6y ago
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.
- tracker1 6y ago
  Might be easier to switch usb wifi adapters... I'm half surprised it doesn't work out of the box.
  - redisman 6y ago
    I'll probably get one of the PCI-e ones that they recommend. This is one of those $10 Amazon ones.
locusm 6y ago
Is the ZFS root partition support there?
daniel5151 6y ago
Hahaha, just this morning I'd made a 19.10 live USB to re-install PopOS on my desktop. If only I had procrastinated a little longer...
9c8675a8 6y ago
Ubuntu with their snaps, "cloud init" etc. is garbage and seems to be getting worse. Pop OS should probably not build on Ubuntu for this reason -- unless Ubuntu changes course..
kstenerud 6y ago
Wow, took me all of 3 minutes to break it. Windows share browsing is completely broken :( I even got the OS to get stuck with modal requestors that you can't dismiss. SMB browsing is the first thing I try on a new distribution, because it's almost always broken.
jbj 6y ago
I am tempted to get their new lemur pro as my next machine, but I don't have enough impression of the build quality. 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? I'd gladly pay a premium for the option to get a more ergonomic keyboard.
- isantop 6y ago
  https://gadgetboy.org/review-system76-lemur-pro/ https://gadgetboy.org/review-system76-lemur-pro/
  - jbj 6y ago
    Great and useful review!
Corrado 6y ago
I upgraded last night and it feels like the fonts are better. My screen seems to be more clear and easier to read. Hopefully they've also fixed the problem where Firefox causes massive periodic disk I/O which freezes my whole computer for minutes on end.
arh68 6y ago
I am new to Pop, just installed over top Ubuntu (uptime 61d, I shed a tear). Pop is great. The mouse feels better (but I can'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!?). I went to the Pop website [1] to get codecs working (Twitch), super easy. A Ryzen + Pop!_OS is my new "Mac Pro", to replace my 2010 5,1 model. I recommend it, having used distros from Red Hat 9 to Mint/Ubuntu to Gentoo to Slackware. [1] https://support.system76.com/articles/codecs/ https://support.system76.com/articles/codecs/
jamieweb 6y ago
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. Do your own verification as well!

269 points by jamieweb 6y ago

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

linsomniac 6y ago
As a long time i3 user, I'll admit the tiling looks pretty appealing. Trying to figure out what i3 gives me that the Pop OS tiling wouldn't. There are definitely a few things, but probably 95% of my workflow is there. I recently installed Ubuntu 18.04 and set up i3 via Regolith, and I'm trying to figure out if it's giving me anything other than a new set of keyboard shortcuts. But something about it seems a lot slower than a week ago before I upgraded from bare i3 on 18.04.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  > Trying to figure out what i3 gives me that the Pop OS tiling wouldn't I don't know how other people use i3, but I didn't see anything about stacked / tabbed layouts. They've become so baked into my workflow that I can't use anything without them for my personal laptop, at least- work forces me to use macOS :(
  - jackpot51 6y ago
    We will be working on stacking support soon
    - zdragnar 6y ago
      That is wonderful news! I look forward to trying it out

whalesalad 6y ago

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. 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? 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.

giancarlostoro 6y ago
Thank you, I too find the name choice a bit thoughtless. I get it you wanted to be different. But that is a really hard to google for name. I would of preferred Sys76OS
- thanksforfish 6y ago
  Seems OK. Google, Bing, and DDG all show the sys76 pop OS site when I search for just pop os. Searching for "how to burn a CD pop os" has less useful results than "how to burn a CD ubuntu", but I think that's a user base size issue, not a naming issue.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  That would imply that it was a horrible old IBM thing. Though, to be honest, so does their company name.
elagost 6y ago
A heavy criticism of a lot of these ubuntu-based distros is "ubuntu + a custom PPA", but system76 does actually put in a lot of work into a custom kernel and some neat UI tweaks that make the OS on their hardware really well. They also have a firmware updater for their systems built into the settings program. The whole experience is a lot more refined than Ubuntu, I believe. It's a great OS for their machines, as well as any laptop with hybrid Intel/Nvidia graphics.
- 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Ingon 6y ago

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. I’ll be upgrading from 18.04, so I hope to see a lot of new stuff. Finger crossesed, without much hiccups.

cbHXBY1D 6y ago

I've been pleasantly surpised with Pop OS. I'd been a Xubuntu user for nearly 10 years but have switched to Pop because of all the work they'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.

csdreamer7 6y ago
As a Lemur 2012 and 2016 owner-I think you will be quite happy with it.

InTheArena 6y ago

I downloaded the beta a week ago, and was very impressed. I love the auto-tiling. I've been trying to get into that for a while, but never found it polished enough. This is a fantastic implementation, that doesn't require you to memorize all of the keyboard combos to get started. I'm very torn about flatpack versus snaps versus debian. This fragmentation is awful. I'd like to see a ZFS (with encryption) default soon as well.

fermienrico 6y ago

System76 if you'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 & Olufsen, Apple, Braun, etc. System76 has such a huge potential but their marketing and design is lacking severely. You guys need to realize that great companies such as Apple have a certain design ethos(some people resonate with it and some don'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'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. System76 has the potential to be the most amazing linux-based computer company in the world - but they don't have the right type of leadership. Leadership needs to have good "taste".

camelCaseCamel 6y ago
Yes and please release something like the Lemur Pro with a 4K or at least a WQHD display.
- mcv 6y ago
  4K is overkill on a laptop. I recently got a 15" Thinkpad with a 4K screen, and while it looks gorgeous, I doubt I'd notice the difference with QHD. Though QHD is definitely an upgrade compared to FHD.
Klonoar 6y ago
I'll be the first in line to say that, in general, Linux/OSS-centric companies never get this right. But this is just such a strange thing to say: "System76 if you'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 & Olufsen, Apple, Braun, etc." That is not only absurdly expensive, it disregards the actual situation: open source work in general suffers from a lack of designers willing to be involved. If this was a simple thing to do, I'd wager System76 would have already done it. On a personal note, I'd much rather they get to a point where they're fashioning their own hardware... otherwise I'm staying on a Macbook, because I'm not going back to plastic shells. The software design can wait, it's not like it hasn't already done so for years.

chmk 6y ago

If you have a discrete nvidia card and don'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't it's a quality distro

modzu 6y ago
thats what i thought and was true for a while but ive found that always having the bleeding edge driver has led to a fair bit of instability. im back to debian and its solid. just add contrib and non free repos and nvidia-driver is there

markphip 6y ago

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. 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" Macbook from work around when I need to travel to the office. I will probably just get it upgraded when Apple refreshes the 13" Pro. Anyway, +1 for PopOS and you do not have to run System76 hardware to use it.

derethanhausen 6y ago
Did the graphics you chose have quality, easy to install drivers? Been thinking of doing something similar.
- bgorman 6y ago
  If you have Intel or AMD graphics work perfectly under Linux. You don't even need to install drivers because they are shipped in the Kernel.
  - est31 6y ago
    There are kernel components of drivers as well as userspace components. But they are all available via package managers, so no need to install them.
  - blackfawn 6y ago
    Out of curiosity, do people have issues with Nvidia in Linux? I've seen similar sentiment in the past but I've never really noticed any issues with the nouveau (open source) driver. Due to CUDA work, I primarily use the proprietary drivers which work well too (other than an annoying suspend bug introduced in 18.04 and seemingly unfixed in 20.04)

acidburnNSA 6y ago

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's astoundingly light and performant for its class. I absolutely love it. https://system76.com/laptops/lemur https://system76.com/laptops/lemur

teruakohatu 6y ago
Looks great. Do you know how nicely their trackpads work? I wish there was an option with a Ryzen 4000 and discrete graphics card, but it is still really compelling and I would buy one in a heartbeat if it was not for the fact that I wouldn't be able to get it serviced in my country.
gregwebs 6y ago
That looks like it might be a decent quality build instead of a plastic piece of junk build quality I experienced 5 years ago. I have been using Dell with pre-installed Ubuntu since, but it is a little underwhelming and of course my audio isn't working now. I was looking towards a ThinkPad with Fedora for my next machine.
- acidburnNSA 6y ago
  The build quality and hardware compatibility is really great. Strong hinges, good trackpad, nice feeling keyboard. There are a few quirks (e.g. with ghost keys) but the firmware people appear to be working on it (nice that I can subscribe to the issues on github).
- freedomben 6y ago
  I've been doing the ThinkPad + Fedora now for a few years, and it's by far the best Linux experience I've ever had. I've had a system76 laptop (quite a few years ago now), Dell XPS/Precision, and some Acer, HP, etc. Unless/until Lenovo ruins the Thinkpad, that's what I'll continue to do. Current model Thinkpad T580 i7-8650U, 32GB RAM Fedora 31. Intel graphics.

bgorman 6y ago

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. 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.

kitsunesoba 6y ago
I would love to see a DE/distro that more closely emulates macOS. A lot of people will point to Gnome and especially elementary OS for this, but they're really only Mac-like in that they're not Win9x-inspired like most other DEs and take a few design cues from various Apple software (Gnome reminds me more of iOS, and elementaryOS feels distantly related to Mavericks-era macOS). Of course one can always cobble something together for their own use, whether that be so amalgamation of WM+associated utilities or hammering on KDE or XFCE until it kinda takes on the desired shape, but nothing can replace a purposefully designed, opinionated DE.
- badsectoracula 6y ago
  A purposefully designed and opinionated DE cannot really exist without a purposefully designed and opinionated GUI framework, which is probably why Gtk is nowadays often called the "Gnome Tool Kit".
- terhechte 6y ago
  Did you try deep in Linux?
ubercow13 6y ago
You might be able to use Nix as a kind of ‘homebrew for Debian’

kroltan 6y ago

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

plausible 6y ago

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. 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. Edit: typo.

tannhaeuser 6y ago
There's a sentiment of flatpak being a community thing whereas snap being a case of Ubuntu NIH, but isn't flatpak as much a RedHat lock-in? Is there a technical reason to prefer flatpak over snap, or is the number/up-to-dateness of available apps a reason to prefer one over the other? The info at http://flatkill.org/ http://flatkill.org/ certainly is sobering with respect to actual security gained by application sandboxing. I'd really hate into being drawn into another energy-consuming VHS-vs-Betamax or BD-vs-HDDVD drama. I'd much prefer a single statically linked binary if at all possible (though it may not be given that browsers or browser runtimes on which many modern "apps"/packages are based have accumulated way too much crap over the years, which I think is the actual problem).
- Sammi 6y ago
  The bikeshedding over snap vs flatpack by some people is a huge drain on any conversations on Ubuntu these days. Snaps work fine. Flatpack works fine. Both solve real problems that people have that the old ways of doing packages didn't solve.
  - intpx 6y ago
    Except with Snaps its a pain in the absolute ass to give an application access to anything that it wasn't shipped with access to. The whole interface paradigm sucks. With flatpaks its easy. That being said, I still think both of them are not nearly as good as the old way of packaging-- I want software that doesn't hide all of its dependencies (and thus vulnerabilities) from me by default. If the linux world could pull their head out of their asses on the desktop environment wars, neither would even be needed. Though I wills say, both are better than electron apps.

deadbunny 6y ago

After being disappointed with Ubuntu'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. Can anyone answer the following? Does Pop inherit Ubuntus snapifictation with 20.04? Do they release newer kernels for the LTS releases like Canonical does with Ubuntu LTS? Do they pack ZFS in the kernel like Ubuntu?

Shared404 6y ago
I can't speak for the lower two questions, but Pop has gone the other direction on snaps. The default method of app installation is apt, but if that is unavailable, it will use flatpak from flathub.
- deadbunny 6y ago
  Good to know, thanks for replying!
- thekyle 6y ago
  That's good to hear. I do prefer Flatpaks to snaps since they don't auto update and you can have multiple repos.
- camjohnson26 6y ago
  They have the Pop shop too, which seems to do something that’s not apt, haven’t had good luck with that, the versions are often out of date.
noisem4ker 6y ago
How would you describe the "Canonical way of doing things"?
- jdub 6y ago
  Choosing to do their own thing instead of helping define and adopt the development community consensus approach, spewing FUD and criticism of the community for 2 or 3 years, then finally giving up and adopting what the rest of the community did in the first place.

Engineer2Throw 6y ago

Has anyone disabled mouse acceleration? This has been my difficulty with Linux desktop

lostmsu 6y ago

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't mind!).

isantop 6y ago
If we minded, it wouldn't be open source. ;)

redisman 6y ago

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.

tracker1 6y ago
Might be easier to switch usb wifi adapters... I'm half surprised it doesn't work out of the box.
- redisman 6y ago
  I'll probably get one of the PCI-e ones that they recommend. This is one of those $10 Amazon ones.

locusm 6y ago

Is the ZFS root partition support there?

daniel5151 6y ago

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

9c8675a8 6y ago

Ubuntu with their snaps, "cloud init" etc. is garbage and seems to be getting worse. Pop OS should probably not build on Ubuntu for this reason -- unless Ubuntu changes course..

kstenerud 6y ago

Wow, took me all of 3 minutes to break it. Windows share browsing is completely broken :( I even got the OS to get stuck with modal requestors that you can't dismiss. SMB browsing is the first thing I try on a new distribution, because it's almost always broken.

jbj 6y ago

I am tempted to get their new lemur pro as my next machine, but I don't have enough impression of the build quality. 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? I'd gladly pay a premium for the option to get a more ergonomic keyboard.

isantop 6y ago
https://gadgetboy.org/review-system76-lemur-pro/ https://gadgetboy.org/review-system76-lemur-pro/
- jbj 6y ago
  Great and useful review!

Corrado 6y ago

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

arh68 6y ago

I am new to Pop, just installed over top Ubuntu (uptime 61d, I shed a tear). Pop is great. The mouse feels better (but I can'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!?). I went to the Pop website [1] to get codecs working (Twitch), super easy. A Ryzen + Pop!_OS is my new "Mac Pro", to replace my 2010 5,1 model. I recommend it, having used distros from Red Hat 9 to Mint/Ubuntu to Gentoo to Slackware. [1] https://support.system76.com/articles/codecs/ https://support.system76.com/articles/codecs/

jamieweb 6y ago

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. Do your own verification as well!