25 ms·

Pop_OS 21.04

216 points by zathan 5y ago

mindcrime 5y ago
I just got my first System 76 laptop a couple of weeks ago. TBH, I knew they shipped their own Linux distro, but I kinda assumed the first thing I would do would be to wipe everything and install Fedora or Arch or something. In the end, I wanted to play around with the machine a bit, so I left Pop!OS on, "at least for a little while". Once I got in there and switched my desktop environment to KDE Plasma, and realized that Pop!OS is apparently derived from Ubuntu, I started thinking I might keep it around. After a couple of weeks of use, so far it seems fine. Maybe the only thing I find slightly annoying is that the machines don't ship with the drives setup with LVM. Of course LVM is there if you want to use it, and that's not a slight on the OS, just the default configuration. Anyway... consider this something of a tentative endorsement of Pop! from me. I need to use it a while longer, but so far so good.
- ArchD 5y ago
  What do you need to do with LVM on a laptop that can't be done in another way? Adding physical volumes to the logical volumes is not a big use case for laptops with limited space for expansion. As for encryption, it can be done without LVM.
  - chfnhhxjs 5y ago
    LVM makes encrypted swap (and thus encrypted hibernation) way easier.
    - Sunspark 5y ago
      Wouldn't it be easier to just not use swap on a 16 GB+ machine and sleep it instead of hibernating it?
      - LanternLight83 5y ago
        Hibernation has always felt more stable and complete to me, all the session-preservation advantages of sleeping but you still the machine go cold, lights out. Also a fan of hybrid sleep. > Wouldn't it be easier to just not use swap . . . ? In addition to preferences for hibernation, I'm a firm believer that there's a time and a place for swapping, and that one's system is worse off for lacking that option. I may not push my system's memory limits like I used to, but I certainly have pushed through 16GB, and don't like the idea that there wouldn't be a fallback like ZRAM or swap-space backing up the OOM daemon, which I'd rather didn't kill my processes in all but the most dire of circumstances. Some amount of swapping will be done by the kernel, even on a 64GB machine with memory to spare, and without the time to do my research tonight, I trust that the kernel delelopers had solid arguments for implementing the behaviors behind that baseline swap usage. You could make the argument that a swapfile will work just fine, and if you're not going for hibernation that just a few gigs is all you need. Live the flexibility of swap files. I wonder if you could put that behind an encrypted block device within another filesystem, ecryptfs-style. I've been using a proper swap partition (just a hair larger than RAM, for hibernation) since the late oughts, and, ZRAM aside, am well-and-truely stuck in my ways.
      - kzemek 5y ago
        Related article that popped up sometime ago on HN: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
  - stonogo 5y ago
    Snapshots.
  - mindcrime 5y ago
    What do you need to do with LVM on a laptop that can't be done in another way? Probably nothing that you can't do, but I bought a machine with lots of storage space, spread over three physical devices, and I'm just accustomed to using LVM to manage things. It's not exactly a "Big Deal" or anything. Just something that jumped out to me based on my pre-existing biases.
- cat199 5y ago
  somewhat in the same boat - also ended up staying - at this point I'd recommend pop OS on end-user devices in place of ubuntu since it has a few nice things for polish (boot to recovery partition, various UI tweaks) and doesn't really deviate from base ubuntu much otherwise also, a plug for system76 - used to play the whole dmesg-device-support-lottery with laptops; feels good paying a small premium to avoid this and support a company who is helping the ecosystem instead of throwing away whatever ms license fee & hours of system tweaking I'd be paying otherwise.
posnet 5y ago
I really want to like System76. But I don't think I can go back to 1080p after having 4k on my XPS 13.
- gizdan 5y ago
  I don't understand these high resolutions on such tiny screens. They're just a waste of power. 1080p is plenty good enough.
  - imbnwa 5y ago
    I work with tmux and vim a lot and the difference in font rendering is huge between 1080p and 4K
    - gizdan 5y ago
      So do I. I really don't see it.
      - Klonoar 5y ago
        This is a common complaint in just about any System76 thread, so I'd wager it's fairly valid at this point. Just because you're fine with it doesn't mean the average user wants that in 2021.
      - stjohnswarts 5y ago
        Probably depends on how small you set your font.
        3np 5y ago
        Indeed. It does get more tiring on the eyes once you go below ~10 px no matter how you slice it.
  - ashdev 5y ago
    I use to think along the same lines. However due to nature of my work, I switch between a MacBook and PC quite often. When I go from MacBook to a laptop with 1080p resolution, I could see why people prefer higher resolutions. Font rendering and entire experience of reading on a computer becomes so much better.
wildrhythms 5y ago
Can someone comment on the state of UI scaling in Pop OS? I have a 3840x2160 display and the usual 1x or 2x UI scaling "options" for current popular DEs is extremely disappointing. Mac OS and Windows 10 don't have a problem scaling everything up to 1.5 or 1.75 and retaining sharpness.
- arvinsim 5y ago
  I don’t know what version of PopOs you are using. But mine with the 20.10 version supports fractional scaling on my desktop. Are you talking about their laptops?
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Are you using wayland?
- rtpg 5y ago
  you can activate fractional scaling with gnome-tweaks and get 150%. Not super sure why that's not available by default (perhaps it ends up doing some lossy transforms on desktop resources and the like)
  - gizdan 5y ago
    Last I checked it wasn't available because it was experimental. I assume at some point they will add the necessary toggles in the UI without using tweaks.
    - arvinsim 5y ago
      It has been available last year https://twitter.com/system76/status/1313573512792215558 https://twitter.com/system76/status/1313573512792215558
- gizdan 5y ago
  System76 has added some improvements to the GNOME's HiDPI implementation. I'm not entirely sure what the improvements are but for example they've got a HiDPI daemon. Anyway, last I used fractional scaling (this is GNOME built-in), I ended up giving up because it just refused to work properly. I have a ultra wide 4k screen, plus my laptop screen. I really wanted to have my laptop screen at 4k when plugged in with 2x scaling, and the ultra wide 4k with 1x scaling, but it caused more trouble than it was worth. So I eventually gave up. Fractional scaling was an experimental feature when I used it, around 12 months ago, so it could have improved.
amanzi 5y ago
I've been using the beta for the last week or so and it's a nice upgrade in lots of subtle ways.
least 5y ago
PopOS feels like an extremely pragmatic operating system as far as linux distributions go. Yes, I do want my broadcom wifi card to just work. I do want my dedicated Nvidia graphics card to actually be useful. Anyone that disagrees with those sorts of principles can of course simply install a different distribution that aligns more closely with their own personal philosophy and gives them the absolute control that they need, but for me, I just want it to work. I also think that the enhancements they've made with their Cosmic Desktop are indeed that - enhancements over base Gnome desktop, and they, as with most of the things have done, gone with a pragmatic approach to them. The automatic tiling is built on top of gnome rather than requiring a separate window manager (this is a much bigger feature than I think it's been given credit for). Workspaces are more prominent and there are more ways to make working with them better than on default Gnome. The launcher is also much more robust and more closely mimics spotlight search or Alfred rather than Launchpad. I'm glad that PopOS exists and I would probably recommend it to anyone who wants to get their feet wet with linux and anyone that is curious about automatic tiling window managers - this is a great starting point with low commitment requirements.
- lmm 5y ago
  > PopOS feels like an extremely pragmatic operating system as far as linux distributions go. Yes, I do want my broadcom wifi card to just work. I do want my dedicated Nvidia graphics card to actually be useful. Anyone that disagrees with those sorts of principles can of course simply install a different distribution that aligns more closely with their own personal philosophy and gives them the absolute control that they need, but for me, I just want it to work. That seems like a kind of self-contradictory philosophy - if you care more about whether it "just works" than how much control you have, how does it make sense to want to run Linux at all?
  - innocenat 5y ago
    I use Linux not because of control, but because I don't like both MacOS and Windows. PopOS is my preferred choice because it's just work.
  - ReactiveJelly 5y ago
Andrex 5y ago
Currently stuck between this and Elementary for my next machine.
- francislavoie 5y ago
  Go with Pop I think. They update faster and have more people actively working on it. I used elementary for a couple years and dropped it eventually cause updates were too slow and went back to Ubuntu. I'll probably go with Pop on my next reinstall (I'm in no hurry to reinstall, it's always a chore).
- jordemort 5y ago
  I'm in the same spot; this looks nice and it's available now, but the upcoming version of Elementary looks really good too, and I really want to try their mail client.
  - themodelplumber 5y ago
    Elementary has a new mail client? I just noticed that Vivaldi has one now too...
- mackrevinack 5y ago
  i love the look of elementary and how consistent all the ui is but the last time i tried i really missed being able to resize and move windows with the super key. on pop, super + right click and drag lets you resize when your cursor is in any corner of a window, and the same but with a left click lets you move a window even if your cursor is at the bottom of a window. it makes it so quick and easy to arrange windows that ive never bothered with pop's tiling manager. it was a long time that i tried elementary though so they may have added that feature by now
- fbnlsr 5y ago
  I had the same issue last year when I was thinking about ditching MacOS in favor of Linux. I'm glad I chose PopOS. Elementary is beautiful but the release cycle and the app updates is way too slow for my taste. I've been using PopOS as my main work OS (I'm a web developer) on a Thinkpad T480 for more than a year now and I'm super happy with it.
sornen 5y ago
The tiling window manager in popOS is well thought out, has intuitive key bindings. As a former i3wm user I find it a significantly better.
- mmgutz 5y ago
  Genuine curiousity, in what ways is it significantly better? I'm a die hard i3 user and if there's a better tiling window manager I would switch. Can you hide all window chrome like titlebar, borders, etc to maximize pixels? How about managing window container groups? Can you cycle between different layouts, eg tabbed, split, stacked like in i3. Can you move windows to a specific desktop/monitor with keyboard? Is auto splitting and arrangement supported like bspwm or i3? I've tried all tiling window managers and I settled on i3.
  - square_usual 5y ago
    As another i3 user, Pop shell isn't as good as i3 IMO. In particular, I felt their stacking option was half-backed when I tried it, which was when it came out. The advantage is that it has much better support for stuff Gnome comes with out of the box, which you might have to configure for yourself in i3. At the end of the day, if you are happy with your i3 setup, I see no reason to switch to Pop Shell.
  - qbasic_forever 5y ago
    No it doesn't have nearly those features as far as I know. However, it has an on and off button right in the top bar. And it has a couple click way to add a window as an exception. So you can have all your terminals, browsers, etc. tiled and perfect... but when a random little tool, dialog, etc. smashes in and ruins and everything it's easy to make it float above as an exception. And if that isn't working you just flip it off and deal with the annoying program, then flip it back on. I like it a lot. I don't come from a background of i3 or power usage of tiling WMs (to be honest I really loved paper WM, another cool gnome tiling-like extension). But pop's tiling manager seems like the perfect balance of good for users that want tiling but don't want to go all in on it.
villgax 5y ago
Wish Nvidia Docker issues were resolved, otherwise I'd happily skip ubuntu to enjoy the window tiling manager from Pop_OS
kilodeca 5y ago
Linux distributions having 'OS' in their name is confusing.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Not really if you look up the accepted definition of OS
  - ginko 5y ago
    Still, Pop!_OS doesn't even have it's own package manager. It's just a Debian derivative like so many other distros out there. I agree that calling it a separate OS is pushing it. At least distros like NixOS have fundamentally different architectures.
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  iOS, MacOS, iPadOS, WearOS, etc would like a word with you. Edit: also JunOS, the other ios, WatchOS...
- axaxs 5y ago
  A kernel is not an OS. Or do you consider Android just another linux distro?
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  I thought that about GTK themes
sam0x17 5y ago
Just a note if you like Pop! OS you would probably also like Ubuntu Budgie. Definitely worth checking out!
crasla 5y ago
why release 21.04 this late? 21.10 is soon here and 21.04 will be eol!
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  They build it on top of those ubuntu releases, and they have quite a few customizations that go far beyond the typical skin-deep UI tweaks of other distros. They change stuff up like switching to systemd-boot vs. grub, have a really nice LVM and full disk encryption setup (with beautiful boot password entry screen), add a whole bunch of new gnome extensions, etc. So it takes time to port those over and get it right I assume.
crasla 5y ago
Why do they release 21.04 this late when 21.10 is out in a couple of months and 21.04 is eol?
- axaxs 5y ago
  It's only been two months since the Ubuntu(upstream) release. The versioning reflects that base. They've been working on Cosmic, which is no small thing, and likely the reason for the delay. Either way, it's 2 months late and 4 months until October's release, so not really ridiculous or anything.
- Sosh101 5y ago
  ? 21.04 is LTS
  - broodbucket 5y ago
    No, LTS releases are .04 releases on even numbered years
    - Sosh101 5y ago
      Oh ok, TIL
acidburnNSA 5y ago
Oof. Been using Pop OS on my System 76 Lemur Pro for a while. Ran through the install commands on this post and it broke my whole install. That's sad. It ended up installing an Ubuntu kernel next to the PopOS one and then the boot partition filled up and as I ran apt --fix-broken I ended up in emergency mode and couldn't boot to any kernel. I'm sure I messed up somewhere along the line but that sucks. Backing up via recovery now and re-imaging...
qchris 5y ago
I just updated this evening from Pop!_OS 20.10. It was pretty painless while using their built-in pop-upgrade tool, even on non-System76 hardware. First impressions are it largely still feels like the previous Pop! (which I'm personally a huge fan of), but a few key elements of my workflow had been broken, mostly surrounding the functionality of the Super key. After a little tinkering, I was able to figure out a good alternative key set, but the transition was a bit jarring. That said, other things like Steam (for example, playing games like Witcher 3 on Proton) still seems flawless, which is always nice. Overall, tentatively pleased, and a little curious what little improvements I'll end up finding and appreciating over the next couple of weeks.
truth_ 5y ago
I have tried Pop OS before, and I decided to not use it again. 1. The Pop Shop doesn't work. The whole system freezes or crashes when the Pop Shop is launched. 2. Internet is much slower in Pop OS. Tried every fix I could find on the internet. 3. The wifi was always problematic. Automatic disconnecting, not being able to connect after the device was put to sleep without a reboot, etc. The problems ran the whole gamut. 4. The power management of Pop OS is visibly much worse than other Linux distros. Laptop battery would drain much faster. 5. Additionally, it had all the problems that you get from using a Linux distro for regular use. I now use Ubuntu, Kubuntu, or Linux Mint for all my personal and work computers. They work with much lesser headache. The power management of these distros are much better than Pop OS. And for those saying NVIDIA just works on Pop, so it does on Ubuntu. I regularly use CUDA drivers for my projects from Ubuntu. It works perfectly. I have had no troubles. I just use the proprietory driver rather than the Open Source one.
mosselman 5y ago
I really like Pop_OS, my nvidia card just works and my steam games were easy to setup. I can even play Fifa through Origin which I setup with Lutris. I once had steam working fine in ubuntu, but that was after hours of installing stuff and rebooting to see if it worked. This was especially for getting my GPU to work properly. With Pop it just works.
piokoch 5y ago
Linux on desktop odyssey again and again. I have a brand new Lenovo Legion 5 with AMD Ryzen, Nvidia 1660Ti. This is definitely not a new hardware nor it has some strange spec. Standard, rather low end stuff for about $1000. I've just installed Ubuntu 21.04 (the newest non LTS version) on it. LTS version cannot be used as touchpad will not work, as newer kernel is needed. I decided to burn ISO on DVD and run installation from USB external drive. Installation started to work, but the drive was working like crazy, after 15 minutes of continuous squeaking I've stopped install and read the Internet. It turned out that installer is doing some "checks" and they take such long time that there is some timeout and it install is started again and again (obviously no clear information about what happened, only some cryptic warning info). Lesson learned: it is virtually impossible to install Ubuntu from CD (at least external one). Ok, I've burned ISO on USB drive. Installation worked ok, but it turned out that screen brightness is set to max value and there is no way to change it - keyboard switches changes are ignored, software switcher is also ignored. Reading internet again. It seems some more people had such issues, no definite recipe how to fix this: some people were changing Nvidia drivers (I did that and it did not help, whatever I used and I've tried all of them), some people were updating to newest kernel (also did that and still no luck). I thought that laptop is broken, but there is some little software called brightness-controller that seems to work (but when I start youtube video, my brightness settings are reset back to max again...). This somehow mitigate issue, but after restart I have to adjust brightness. Next. Bluetooth. I go to settings, turn it on, GUI shows it is turned on, but it is not. When I move to other settings and back to BT settigns I see it is disabled. So enabling is not working, no error message, no information that something is not working. Ok, trying to do this from command line. It seems there is some software called rfkill that blocks BT and you need to run rfkill unblock bluetooth to have BT on. WTF??? So, if someone thinks that Linux is working on desktop I have a bad news. It is not. Maybe if you have some 10 years old Intel laptop with graphic card on board, maybe if you install LTS version on Ubuntu or maybe if you install that newest PopOS then you can be lucky.
- AttakBanana 5y ago
  I installed Pop!_OS 20.10 (non LTS) on my Ryzen 2600 + RTX 3060 Ti PC. No issues whatsoever. Even this random cheap bluetooth dongle I use works without a hassle.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
I like the focus on gestures there. They're doing a lot of good work. They're really making gnome workable, the developers of gnome itself are too puritan for my liking (removing as many options as possible). At the moment I use KDE but I do like where System76 is heading. I just wish they'd make their style a bit more mainstream. The whole "Pop!" branding puts me off. It's too deliberately 'quirky' but doesn't inspire me much confidence that it'll stay around.
nickik 5y ago
My wish for them would be to really focus on being integrated with ZFS. They could really differentiate themselves by doing that. Doing a native encrypted ZFS root system, including ZFSBootMenu style boot system. They control the firmware so they could allow you to set up remote attestation or using local security keys to do the boot. I think that would really put them over the top.
Superblazer 5y ago
I really don't like that default dock. It's thick and wide while serving no purpose other than showing app icons.
j1elo 5y ago
I keep meaning to install either Pop_OS or Regolith, as a means of approaching tiled window managers with a ready to go, opinionated by default system. Pop_OS brings their own tiling, with easy enable/disable buttons, and Regolith is based on Ubuntu with i3. After trying vanilla i3 and Pop_OS before in the past, the inertia of years of using floating windows keeps me going back to known territory (Linux Mint). Also I don't have time to tinker with settings, so I need a well thought out set of defaults. Guess this is a good place to ask! Have you used Regolith and/or Pop_OS? Comments about how the implementations are in each one? Good/bad experiences with them?
- pimterry 5y ago
  I moved to Regolith relatively recently, replacing a previous custom configuration using qtile on top of Debian. I was already pretty comfortable with tiling window managers, and everything was easy & usable for me out of the box, but I did spend a little bit of extra time tweaking it further to get i3 to act just as I wanted it to. Still, moving to an OS where the tiling WM was properly integrated & supported everywhere OOTB was a dramatic improvement overall. It works great so far, all very slick, I'm very happy with it.
- pedrovhb 5y ago
  Over a few years I switched from Ubuntu + i3 to Regolith to Pop_OS, and each switch felt like a step up in terms of "it just works", like it's a higher level WM. Regolith, even though it comes with in much saner defaults and basic system tools than plain i3, still requires you to deal with low-level config files for many common things. Pop just feels like Ubuntu with tiling window management added, which isn't a bad thing. Thing just work even more often and there's some intangible eye candy feeling to using it which is nice. It's definitely not as robust in my experience; there's bugs I run into pretty often (lock screen will sometimes hang, dragging a tiled window to a new position will sometimes fail to update other tiled windows so you have overlapping windows or unused space). Still, overall it's a pleasant experience and these things don't bother me as much as having to figure out why my wifi or audio devices aren't working every other week. I'm on Pop_OS 20.04 for the LTS, so maybe these have been fixed in more recent versions.
HanShotFirst 5y ago
Maybe this is all as a result of installing on my own hardware instead of a System76 laptop, or maybe due to my general unfamiliarity with Linux, but I didn't find installation and setup very easy at all. I was installing alongside Win 10 and it totally borked my bootloader, this in itself took me quite a long time to repair. The steam installer worked well, but I couldn't move my library to a secondary HDD. So some Googling shows I need to install from apt instead of from the PopOS store. Which I do, but then I also had to do some more Google FU to figure out how to get PopOS to mount the secondary HDDs in a useful way. As it is now, about a quarter of the applications I need are in the PopOS store. VLC for example isn't. So while the store is setup nice it is only marginally useful. Finally, switching audio between wired headphones, Bluetooth headphones, and my HDMI monitor has been a nightmare. Does it run well and is it stable once I'm up and running? Yes. But the devil is in the details. I really want to like Linux, and I am enjoying the lack of forced ads on PopOS compared to Windows, but how is widespread adoption of Linux supposed to happen when this is the onboarding process?
dancemethis 5y ago
If only it didn't have the dumb '!' and '_'... Perception of the distro's overall quality would reach the moon.
mark_l_watson 5y ago
Nice! I have not started up my System76 laptop in a little while, but I will play with this later today. I am sort-of locked into Apple's little walled garden because I am mostly retired, and my iPad Pro, iPhone, and Apple Watch comprise most of my device use, and macOS integrates nicely with all three. That said, System76 and Pop_OS are great, and I value the experience and freedom of my System76 laptop. I strongly recommend them.
Shadonototro 5y ago
every update i try gnome, and every time i end up nuking the partition the UX is oppressive and huge, it feels slow, it feels heavy it's everything i hate about macOS without the things i like about macOS XFCE is a much better choice, it's the definition of a desktop OS, lightweight and slim, pair it with [1] and you get a windows like experience [1] https://github.com/nsz32/docklike-plugin https://github.com/nsz32/docklike-plugin
jenowigner 5y ago
Anyone interested in a 2019 System76 Gazelle 32GB RAM i7, GPU laptop? Thinking of upgrading to a newer model. UK based
jenowigner 5y ago
I really liked the previous version it was such a nice experience much better than MacOS, this new update feels like being on a Mac :( why did they have to change it ?

216 points by zathan 5y ago

I just got my first System 76 laptop a couple of weeks ago. TBH, I knew they shipped their own Linux distro, but I kinda assumed the first thing I would do would be to wipe everything and install Fedora or Arch or something. In the end, I wanted to play around with the machine a bit, so I left Pop!OS on, "at least for a little while". Once I got in there and switched my desktop environment to KDE Plasma, and realized that Pop!OS is apparently derived from Ubuntu, I started thinking I might keep it around. After a couple of weeks of use, so far it seems fine. Maybe the only thing I find slightly annoying is that the machines don't ship with the drives setup with LVM. Of course LVM is there if you want to use it, and that's not a slight on the OS, just the default configuration. Anyway... consider this something of a tentative endorsement of Pop! from me. I need to use it a while longer, but so far so good.

ArchD 5y ago
What do you need to do with LVM on a laptop that can't be done in another way? Adding physical volumes to the logical volumes is not a big use case for laptops with limited space for expansion. As for encryption, it can be done without LVM.
- chfnhhxjs 5y ago
  LVM makes encrypted swap (and thus encrypted hibernation) way easier.
  - Sunspark 5y ago
    Wouldn't it be easier to just not use swap on a 16 GB+ machine and sleep it instead of hibernating it?
    - LanternLight83 5y ago
      Hibernation has always felt more stable and complete to me, all the session-preservation advantages of sleeping but you still the machine go cold, lights out. Also a fan of hybrid sleep. > Wouldn't it be easier to just not use swap . . . ? In addition to preferences for hibernation, I'm a firm believer that there's a time and a place for swapping, and that one's system is worse off for lacking that option. I may not push my system's memory limits like I used to, but I certainly have pushed through 16GB, and don't like the idea that there wouldn't be a fallback like ZRAM or swap-space backing up the OOM daemon, which I'd rather didn't kill my processes in all but the most dire of circumstances. Some amount of swapping will be done by the kernel, even on a 64GB machine with memory to spare, and without the time to do my research tonight, I trust that the kernel delelopers had solid arguments for implementing the behaviors behind that baseline swap usage. You could make the argument that a swapfile will work just fine, and if you're not going for hibernation that just a few gigs is all you need. Live the flexibility of swap files. I wonder if you could put that behind an encrypted block device within another filesystem, ecryptfs-style. I've been using a proper swap partition (just a hair larger than RAM, for hibernation) since the late oughts, and, ZRAM aside, am well-and-truely stuck in my ways.
    - kzemek 5y ago
      Related article that popped up sometime ago on HN: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html
- stonogo 5y ago
  Snapshots.
- mindcrime 5y ago
  What do you need to do with LVM on a laptop that can't be done in another way? Probably nothing that you can't do, but I bought a machine with lots of storage space, spread over three physical devices, and I'm just accustomed to using LVM to manage things. It's not exactly a "Big Deal" or anything. Just something that jumped out to me based on my pre-existing biases.
cat199 5y ago
somewhat in the same boat - also ended up staying - at this point I'd recommend pop OS on end-user devices in place of ubuntu since it has a few nice things for polish (boot to recovery partition, various UI tweaks) and doesn't really deviate from base ubuntu much otherwise also, a plug for system76 - used to play the whole dmesg-device-support-lottery with laptops; feels good paying a small premium to avoid this and support a company who is helping the ecosystem instead of throwing away whatever ms license fee & hours of system tweaking I'd be paying otherwise.

posnet 5y ago

I really want to like System76. But I don't think I can go back to 1080p after having 4k on my XPS 13.

gizdan 5y ago
I don't understand these high resolutions on such tiny screens. They're just a waste of power. 1080p is plenty good enough.
- imbnwa 5y ago
  I work with tmux and vim a lot and the difference in font rendering is huge between 1080p and 4K
  - gizdan 5y ago
    So do I. I really don't see it.
    - Klonoar 5y ago
      This is a common complaint in just about any System76 thread, so I'd wager it's fairly valid at this point. Just because you're fine with it doesn't mean the average user wants that in 2021.
    - stjohnswarts 5y ago
      Probably depends on how small you set your font.
      - 3np 5y ago
        Indeed. It does get more tiring on the eyes once you go below ~10 px no matter how you slice it.
- ashdev 5y ago
  I use to think along the same lines. However due to nature of my work, I switch between a MacBook and PC quite often. When I go from MacBook to a laptop with 1080p resolution, I could see why people prefer higher resolutions. Font rendering and entire experience of reading on a computer becomes so much better.

wildrhythms 5y ago

Can someone comment on the state of UI scaling in Pop OS? I have a 3840x2160 display and the usual 1x or 2x UI scaling "options" for current popular DEs is extremely disappointing. Mac OS and Windows 10 don't have a problem scaling everything up to 1.5 or 1.75 and retaining sharpness.

arvinsim 5y ago
I don’t know what version of PopOs you are using. But mine with the 20.10 version supports fractional scaling on my desktop. Are you talking about their laptops?
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Are you using wayland?
rtpg 5y ago
you can activate fractional scaling with gnome-tweaks and get 150%. Not super sure why that's not available by default (perhaps it ends up doing some lossy transforms on desktop resources and the like)
- gizdan 5y ago
  Last I checked it wasn't available because it was experimental. I assume at some point they will add the necessary toggles in the UI without using tweaks.
  - arvinsim 5y ago
    It has been available last year https://twitter.com/system76/status/1313573512792215558 https://twitter.com/system76/status/1313573512792215558
gizdan 5y ago
System76 has added some improvements to the GNOME's HiDPI implementation. I'm not entirely sure what the improvements are but for example they've got a HiDPI daemon. Anyway, last I used fractional scaling (this is GNOME built-in), I ended up giving up because it just refused to work properly. I have a ultra wide 4k screen, plus my laptop screen. I really wanted to have my laptop screen at 4k when plugged in with 2x scaling, and the ultra wide 4k with 1x scaling, but it caused more trouble than it was worth. So I eventually gave up. Fractional scaling was an experimental feature when I used it, around 12 months ago, so it could have improved.

amanzi 5y ago

I've been using the beta for the last week or so and it's a nice upgrade in lots of subtle ways.

least 5y ago

PopOS feels like an extremely pragmatic operating system as far as linux distributions go. Yes, I do want my broadcom wifi card to just work. I do want my dedicated Nvidia graphics card to actually be useful. Anyone that disagrees with those sorts of principles can of course simply install a different distribution that aligns more closely with their own personal philosophy and gives them the absolute control that they need, but for me, I just want it to work. I also think that the enhancements they've made with their Cosmic Desktop are indeed that - enhancements over base Gnome desktop, and they, as with most of the things have done, gone with a pragmatic approach to them. The automatic tiling is built on top of gnome rather than requiring a separate window manager (this is a much bigger feature than I think it's been given credit for). Workspaces are more prominent and there are more ways to make working with them better than on default Gnome. The launcher is also much more robust and more closely mimics spotlight search or Alfred rather than Launchpad. I'm glad that PopOS exists and I would probably recommend it to anyone who wants to get their feet wet with linux and anyone that is curious about automatic tiling window managers - this is a great starting point with low commitment requirements.

lmm 5y ago
> PopOS feels like an extremely pragmatic operating system as far as linux distributions go. Yes, I do want my broadcom wifi card to just work. I do want my dedicated Nvidia graphics card to actually be useful. Anyone that disagrees with those sorts of principles can of course simply install a different distribution that aligns more closely with their own personal philosophy and gives them the absolute control that they need, but for me, I just want it to work. That seems like a kind of self-contradictory philosophy - if you care more about whether it "just works" than how much control you have, how does it make sense to want to run Linux at all?
- innocenat 5y ago
  I use Linux not because of control, but because I don't like both MacOS and Windows. PopOS is my preferred choice because it's just work.
- ReactiveJelly 5y ago

Andrex 5y ago

Currently stuck between this and Elementary for my next machine.

francislavoie 5y ago
Go with Pop I think. They update faster and have more people actively working on it. I used elementary for a couple years and dropped it eventually cause updates were too slow and went back to Ubuntu. I'll probably go with Pop on my next reinstall (I'm in no hurry to reinstall, it's always a chore).
jordemort 5y ago
I'm in the same spot; this looks nice and it's available now, but the upcoming version of Elementary looks really good too, and I really want to try their mail client.
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  Elementary has a new mail client? I just noticed that Vivaldi has one now too...
mackrevinack 5y ago
i love the look of elementary and how consistent all the ui is but the last time i tried i really missed being able to resize and move windows with the super key. on pop, super + right click and drag lets you resize when your cursor is in any corner of a window, and the same but with a left click lets you move a window even if your cursor is at the bottom of a window. it makes it so quick and easy to arrange windows that ive never bothered with pop's tiling manager. it was a long time that i tried elementary though so they may have added that feature by now
fbnlsr 5y ago
I had the same issue last year when I was thinking about ditching MacOS in favor of Linux. I'm glad I chose PopOS. Elementary is beautiful but the release cycle and the app updates is way too slow for my taste. I've been using PopOS as my main work OS (I'm a web developer) on a Thinkpad T480 for more than a year now and I'm super happy with it.

sornen 5y ago

The tiling window manager in popOS is well thought out, has intuitive key bindings. As a former i3wm user I find it a significantly better.

mmgutz 5y ago
Genuine curiousity, in what ways is it significantly better? I'm a die hard i3 user and if there's a better tiling window manager I would switch. Can you hide all window chrome like titlebar, borders, etc to maximize pixels? How about managing window container groups? Can you cycle between different layouts, eg tabbed, split, stacked like in i3. Can you move windows to a specific desktop/monitor with keyboard? Is auto splitting and arrangement supported like bspwm or i3? I've tried all tiling window managers and I settled on i3.
- square_usual 5y ago
  As another i3 user, Pop shell isn't as good as i3 IMO. In particular, I felt their stacking option was half-backed when I tried it, which was when it came out. The advantage is that it has much better support for stuff Gnome comes with out of the box, which you might have to configure for yourself in i3. At the end of the day, if you are happy with your i3 setup, I see no reason to switch to Pop Shell.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  No it doesn't have nearly those features as far as I know. However, it has an on and off button right in the top bar. And it has a couple click way to add a window as an exception. So you can have all your terminals, browsers, etc. tiled and perfect... but when a random little tool, dialog, etc. smashes in and ruins and everything it's easy to make it float above as an exception. And if that isn't working you just flip it off and deal with the annoying program, then flip it back on. I like it a lot. I don't come from a background of i3 or power usage of tiling WMs (to be honest I really loved paper WM, another cool gnome tiling-like extension). But pop's tiling manager seems like the perfect balance of good for users that want tiling but don't want to go all in on it.

villgax 5y ago

Wish Nvidia Docker issues were resolved, otherwise I'd happily skip ubuntu to enjoy the window tiling manager from Pop_OS

kilodeca 5y ago

Linux distributions having 'OS' in their name is confusing.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
Not really if you look up the accepted definition of OS
- ginko 5y ago
  Still, Pop!_OS doesn't even have it's own package manager. It's just a Debian derivative like so many other distros out there. I agree that calling it a separate OS is pushing it. At least distros like NixOS have fundamentally different architectures.
Godel_unicode 5y ago
iOS, MacOS, iPadOS, WearOS, etc would like a word with you. Edit: also JunOS, the other ios, WatchOS...
axaxs 5y ago
A kernel is not an OS. Or do you consider Android just another linux distro?
themodelplumber 5y ago
I thought that about GTK themes

sam0x17 5y ago

Just a note if you like Pop! OS you would probably also like Ubuntu Budgie. Definitely worth checking out!

crasla 5y ago

why release 21.04 this late? 21.10 is soon here and 21.04 will be eol!

qbasic_forever 5y ago
They build it on top of those ubuntu releases, and they have quite a few customizations that go far beyond the typical skin-deep UI tweaks of other distros. They change stuff up like switching to systemd-boot vs. grub, have a really nice LVM and full disk encryption setup (with beautiful boot password entry screen), add a whole bunch of new gnome extensions, etc. So it takes time to port those over and get it right I assume.

crasla 5y ago

Why do they release 21.04 this late when 21.10 is out in a couple of months and 21.04 is eol?

axaxs 5y ago
It's only been two months since the Ubuntu(upstream) release. The versioning reflects that base. They've been working on Cosmic, which is no small thing, and likely the reason for the delay. Either way, it's 2 months late and 4 months until October's release, so not really ridiculous or anything.
Sosh101 5y ago
? 21.04 is LTS
- broodbucket 5y ago
  No, LTS releases are .04 releases on even numbered years
  - Sosh101 5y ago
    Oh ok, TIL

acidburnNSA 5y ago

Oof. Been using Pop OS on my System 76 Lemur Pro for a while. Ran through the install commands on this post and it broke my whole install. That's sad. It ended up installing an Ubuntu kernel next to the PopOS one and then the boot partition filled up and as I ran apt --fix-broken I ended up in emergency mode and couldn't boot to any kernel. I'm sure I messed up somewhere along the line but that sucks. Backing up via recovery now and re-imaging...

qchris 5y ago

I just updated this evening from Pop!_OS 20.10. It was pretty painless while using their built-in pop-upgrade tool, even on non-System76 hardware. First impressions are it largely still feels like the previous Pop! (which I'm personally a huge fan of), but a few key elements of my workflow had been broken, mostly surrounding the functionality of the Super key. After a little tinkering, I was able to figure out a good alternative key set, but the transition was a bit jarring. That said, other things like Steam (for example, playing games like Witcher 3 on Proton) still seems flawless, which is always nice. Overall, tentatively pleased, and a little curious what little improvements I'll end up finding and appreciating over the next couple of weeks.

truth_ 5y ago

I have tried Pop OS before, and I decided to not use it again. 1. The Pop Shop doesn't work. The whole system freezes or crashes when the Pop Shop is launched. 2. Internet is much slower in Pop OS. Tried every fix I could find on the internet. 3. The wifi was always problematic. Automatic disconnecting, not being able to connect after the device was put to sleep without a reboot, etc. The problems ran the whole gamut. 4. The power management of Pop OS is visibly much worse than other Linux distros. Laptop battery would drain much faster. 5. Additionally, it had all the problems that you get from using a Linux distro for regular use. I now use Ubuntu, Kubuntu, or Linux Mint for all my personal and work computers. They work with much lesser headache. The power management of these distros are much better than Pop OS. And for those saying NVIDIA just works on Pop, so it does on Ubuntu. I regularly use CUDA drivers for my projects from Ubuntu. It works perfectly. I have had no troubles. I just use the proprietory driver rather than the Open Source one.

mosselman 5y ago

I really like Pop_OS, my nvidia card just works and my steam games were easy to setup. I can even play Fifa through Origin which I setup with Lutris. I once had steam working fine in ubuntu, but that was after hours of installing stuff and rebooting to see if it worked. This was especially for getting my GPU to work properly. With Pop it just works.

piokoch 5y ago

Linux on desktop odyssey again and again. I have a brand new Lenovo Legion 5 with AMD Ryzen, Nvidia 1660Ti. This is definitely not a new hardware nor it has some strange spec. Standard, rather low end stuff for about $1000. I've just installed Ubuntu 21.04 (the newest non LTS version) on it. LTS version cannot be used as touchpad will not work, as newer kernel is needed. I decided to burn ISO on DVD and run installation from USB external drive. Installation started to work, but the drive was working like crazy, after 15 minutes of continuous squeaking I've stopped install and read the Internet. It turned out that installer is doing some "checks" and they take such long time that there is some timeout and it install is started again and again (obviously no clear information about what happened, only some cryptic warning info). Lesson learned: it is virtually impossible to install Ubuntu from CD (at least external one). Ok, I've burned ISO on USB drive. Installation worked ok, but it turned out that screen brightness is set to max value and there is no way to change it - keyboard switches changes are ignored, software switcher is also ignored. Reading internet again. It seems some more people had such issues, no definite recipe how to fix this: some people were changing Nvidia drivers (I did that and it did not help, whatever I used and I've tried all of them), some people were updating to newest kernel (also did that and still no luck). I thought that laptop is broken, but there is some little software called brightness-controller that seems to work (but when I start youtube video, my brightness settings are reset back to max again...). This somehow mitigate issue, but after restart I have to adjust brightness. Next. Bluetooth. I go to settings, turn it on, GUI shows it is turned on, but it is not. When I move to other settings and back to BT settigns I see it is disabled. So enabling is not working, no error message, no information that something is not working. Ok, trying to do this from command line. It seems there is some software called rfkill that blocks BT and you need to run rfkill unblock bluetooth to have BT on. WTF??? So, if someone thinks that Linux is working on desktop I have a bad news. It is not. Maybe if you have some 10 years old Intel laptop with graphic card on board, maybe if you install LTS version on Ubuntu or maybe if you install that newest PopOS then you can be lucky.

AttakBanana 5y ago
I installed Pop!_OS 20.10 (non LTS) on my Ryzen 2600 + RTX 3060 Ti PC. No issues whatsoever. Even this random cheap bluetooth dongle I use works without a hassle.

GekkePrutser 5y ago

I like the focus on gestures there. They're doing a lot of good work. They're really making gnome workable, the developers of gnome itself are too puritan for my liking (removing as many options as possible). At the moment I use KDE but I do like where System76 is heading. I just wish they'd make their style a bit more mainstream. The whole "Pop!" branding puts me off. It's too deliberately 'quirky' but doesn't inspire me much confidence that it'll stay around.

nickik 5y ago

My wish for them would be to really focus on being integrated with ZFS. They could really differentiate themselves by doing that. Doing a native encrypted ZFS root system, including ZFSBootMenu style boot system. They control the firmware so they could allow you to set up remote attestation or using local security keys to do the boot. I think that would really put them over the top.

Superblazer 5y ago

I really don't like that default dock. It's thick and wide while serving no purpose other than showing app icons.

j1elo 5y ago

I keep meaning to install either Pop_OS or Regolith, as a means of approaching tiled window managers with a ready to go, opinionated by default system. Pop_OS brings their own tiling, with easy enable/disable buttons, and Regolith is based on Ubuntu with i3. After trying vanilla i3 and Pop_OS before in the past, the inertia of years of using floating windows keeps me going back to known territory (Linux Mint). Also I don't have time to tinker with settings, so I need a well thought out set of defaults. Guess this is a good place to ask! Have you used Regolith and/or Pop_OS? Comments about how the implementations are in each one? Good/bad experiences with them?

pimterry 5y ago
I moved to Regolith relatively recently, replacing a previous custom configuration using qtile on top of Debian. I was already pretty comfortable with tiling window managers, and everything was easy & usable for me out of the box, but I did spend a little bit of extra time tweaking it further to get i3 to act just as I wanted it to. Still, moving to an OS where the tiling WM was properly integrated & supported everywhere OOTB was a dramatic improvement overall. It works great so far, all very slick, I'm very happy with it.
pedrovhb 5y ago
Over a few years I switched from Ubuntu + i3 to Regolith to Pop_OS, and each switch felt like a step up in terms of "it just works", like it's a higher level WM. Regolith, even though it comes with in much saner defaults and basic system tools than plain i3, still requires you to deal with low-level config files for many common things. Pop just feels like Ubuntu with tiling window management added, which isn't a bad thing. Thing just work even more often and there's some intangible eye candy feeling to using it which is nice. It's definitely not as robust in my experience; there's bugs I run into pretty often (lock screen will sometimes hang, dragging a tiled window to a new position will sometimes fail to update other tiled windows so you have overlapping windows or unused space). Still, overall it's a pleasant experience and these things don't bother me as much as having to figure out why my wifi or audio devices aren't working every other week. I'm on Pop_OS 20.04 for the LTS, so maybe these have been fixed in more recent versions.

HanShotFirst 5y ago

Maybe this is all as a result of installing on my own hardware instead of a System76 laptop, or maybe due to my general unfamiliarity with Linux, but I didn't find installation and setup very easy at all. I was installing alongside Win 10 and it totally borked my bootloader, this in itself took me quite a long time to repair. The steam installer worked well, but I couldn't move my library to a secondary HDD. So some Googling shows I need to install from apt instead of from the PopOS store. Which I do, but then I also had to do some more Google FU to figure out how to get PopOS to mount the secondary HDDs in a useful way. As it is now, about a quarter of the applications I need are in the PopOS store. VLC for example isn't. So while the store is setup nice it is only marginally useful. Finally, switching audio between wired headphones, Bluetooth headphones, and my HDMI monitor has been a nightmare. Does it run well and is it stable once I'm up and running? Yes. But the devil is in the details. I really want to like Linux, and I am enjoying the lack of forced ads on PopOS compared to Windows, but how is widespread adoption of Linux supposed to happen when this is the onboarding process?

dancemethis 5y ago

If only it didn't have the dumb '!' and '_'... Perception of the distro's overall quality would reach the moon.

mark_l_watson 5y ago

Nice! I have not started up my System76 laptop in a little while, but I will play with this later today. I am sort-of locked into Apple's little walled garden because I am mostly retired, and my iPad Pro, iPhone, and Apple Watch comprise most of my device use, and macOS integrates nicely with all three. That said, System76 and Pop_OS are great, and I value the experience and freedom of my System76 laptop. I strongly recommend them.

Shadonototro 5y ago

every update i try gnome, and every time i end up nuking the partition the UX is oppressive and huge, it feels slow, it feels heavy it's everything i hate about macOS without the things i like about macOS XFCE is a much better choice, it's the definition of a desktop OS, lightweight and slim, pair it with [1] and you get a windows like experience [1] https://github.com/nsz32/docklike-plugin https://github.com/nsz32/docklike-plugin

jenowigner 5y ago

Anyone interested in a 2019 System76 Gazelle 32GB RAM i7, GPU laptop? Thinking of upgrading to a newer model. UK based

jenowigner 5y ago

I really liked the previous version it was such a nice experience much better than MacOS, this new update feels like being on a Mac :( why did they have to change it ?