24 ms·

Switching from macOS to Pop_OS

342 points by zathan 5y ago

88913527 5y ago
I find the branding of the gigantic P and the exclamation point, when used as a backdrop, to be excessively distracting from the content in the foreground.
- super_linear 5y ago
  Also find it hard to read the article since I see "Pop!_OS" and think they're trying to emphasize something
  - ourdramadotnet 5y ago
    "PopOS" with no punctuation seems a lot cleaner.
  - allenu 5y ago
    This is my first time reading about this OS and the naming is very strange to me. I don't understand why they decided to go with "!_" in the middle. It feels a little too techy for a mainstream user. Why not PopOS or Pop OS?
    - periheli0n 5y ago
      Maybe there's a German on the team who insisted on visually splitting the "Pop" from the "OS". "Popos" is German for "booties".
    - Shared404 5y ago
      > It feels a little too techy for a mainstream user. To be fair, they market themselves as "Pop!_OS is an operating system for STEM and creative professionals who use their computer as a tool to discover and create." on the main page for the OS. I'll admit, I don't love the !_ but for the opposite reason - it feels faux techy to me.
    - stjohnswarts 5y ago
      It's just branding, PopOS or popos is what most people type Do Not use the pop!_os when searching for related info or you'll get far fewer hits.
EB-Barrington 5y ago
Wanted to read this link, but 404: https://support.system76.com/articles/Pop!_OS-20.04-LTS-Release-Notes https://support.system76.com/articles/Pop!_OS-20.04-LTS-Rele...
zenlf 5y ago
After my previous Linux experience with Ubuntu 10 years ago, I gave pop os a try last year and was surprised how good it was. I think the engineers at System76 really know what they are doing and am excited about their new DE.
- timbit42 5y ago
  So you're comparing current pop os to Ubuntu 10 years ago?
  - rzzzt 5y ago
    Are they? I only see two events mentioned, with 9 years in between.
bitigchi 5y ago
This makes it sound like only Pop_OS! has the applications listed for it and they are not available for macOS. It's also funny that macOS has application installs sorted and the Pop_OS side starts listing paths. :))
multiplegeorges 5y ago
Is it finally the year of Linux on the desktop? But seriously, the work System76 is doing is really great. PopOS is really nice to use. The attention it is getting is well deserved.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >Is it finally the year of Linux on the desktop? Considering that the hope behind this term was about winning the desktop user share from Windows, and not just "being usable" on the desktop, or "being used" on the desktop, no.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Now that Windows 11 is a thing, I think winning desktop user share from Windows will be easier than ever before. What else is the average Joe going to do with their TPM-less devices?
    - nebula8804 5y ago
      Throw them in the trash and buy a new PC. They are pretty cheap.
      - ejj28 5y ago
        Having worked at an independent PC repair shop, there are a lot of people who would rather keep using their old 6+ year old laptops and have SSDs installed in them than go out and buy a new laptop. Yeah there are cheap ones for sale, but they're underpowered, have regular old HDDs, and only 4GB of RAM. Plus, now they're coming with Windows 11 preinstalled, which will annoy a lot of people who are used to Windows 7 or 10.
        marcodiego 5y ago
        6+ year old laptops run very decently with 8gb RAM, a SSD and a modern linux distro.
zibzab 5y ago
This is the distro that LTT used to test Linux gaming, right?
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Wrong distro, this is the one where he typed "Yes, do as I say!" into the console verbatim to uninstall his desktop environment...
  - _dain_ 5y ago
    that chain of events should never have happened in the first place.
- rPlayer6554 5y ago
  Linus tried it but had an issue where installing steam wiped his DE. He switched to Manjaro and Luke used Mint.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Not paying attention while installing steam wiped his desktop. TBF though he isn't that used to using Linux as a desktop. Manjaro did go much smoother for him.
    - rPlayer6554 5y ago
      Linus tried to make the point that on windows you don't have to pay close attention when doing something minor like installing Steam. Because why should something like that ever even have the potential to remove your desktop environment? (*On a system meant for the common consumer that is not an expert in the domain*) Yes he didn't pay attention to the warning, but in fairness Linux gives a lot of warnings. Sudo gives a warning when you first use it, and that's clearly used all the time. To you and I who know what "gnome-de" is (or whatever the package name is) the warning is clear. But to someone new to the space, DE is not a commonly used acronym.
- 5y ago
sam0x17 5y ago
PopOS is nice, but I still find that nothing beats Budgie as far as Ubuntu distros go. Just way cleaner UI than anything else out there.
upbeat_general 5y ago
Having switched from macOS to PopOS very recently, it’s been pretty smooth. My only real issue is that Remote Desktop support is worse than macOS which is itself far worse than Windows RDP. I know it’s a Linux/Debian wide problem, but I’d really like someone to step up and bundle something polished out of the box.
- flatiron 5y ago
  Vnc? I think most people use ssh for remote for Linux which is why it probably doesn’t get much love
  - upbeat_general 5y ago
    Vnc works for the basic use case of viewing a remote screen. It’s a mess for interactive use, especially with the default implementations you can find on Linux imo. macOS’s built in screen sharing is the only vnc server/client combo that has acceptable latency but even it fails to support basic features like dynamic resolution for different clients. And I agree that SSH is definitely far more common; I of course use SSH but there are lots of reasons why an interactive desktop is either required, or just far more convenient.
    - arsome 5y ago
      X forwarding via compressed SSH (ssh -XC) is likely the simplest bet, especially now that WSL has good support for it, if you need more advanced remote desktop you can take a look at x2go which is based on NoMachine's NX protocol.
      - upbeat_general 5y ago
        I’m currently using NoMachine with their custom server/client. X forwarding via SSH only works for single applications and not an entire desktop correct?
    - jeroenhd 5y ago
      It took me (way too much) effort but I managed to get a pretty stable and smooth RDP server set up on my desktop. Sadly, GNOME3 and RDP don't work well together, so it broke after a random upgrade and hasn't worked since. You used to be able to use X11 forwarding quite well, but most tools I use tend to render their entire screens as a canvas causing way too many unnecessary updates. Wayland also makes it nearly impossible to do this on a modern system without compatibility layers. When RDP on Linux works, it works pretty well. I'd love for someone in the GNOME team to find a way to make RDP compatible and easier to set up. There's a VNC setting in the settings somewhere, but VNC is pretty insecure and terrible for interactive work.
kevinak 5y ago
I recently installed Pop_OS on a new Workstation and wanted it to look and feel like MacOS as much as possible. It's surprisingly easy. You can even make Firefox look like Safari if that's your jazz. Here's what I used: https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  I've always found the small instances where macOS Linux themes and actual macOS diverge annoying. To me, themes that use patterns and idioms that were instead inspired by, and not copied from, macOS are a happy medium.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    As much as I enjoy the heritage of Linux theming, I do have to agree with you. A lot of it comes down to a difference in HIG, and as you've suggested, the quality of a theme mostly comes down to how well it works with those constraints. Normally I'm pretty unimpressed (those Big Sur themes have a real chicken-and-egg feel to them), but the few themes that I've seen that go out of their way to make a good, Mac-like experience are Nordic[0] (my personal fav and daily driver), Prof [1], and Juno [2]. [0] https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1267246/ https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1267246/ [1] https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1334194/ https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1334194/ [2] https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1280977/ https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1280977/
- user_7832 5y ago
  > https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme Thanks for this! I didn't realize that such a thing existed.
- akoncius 5y ago
  https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/ might be interesting to you if not looked already
- robertoandred 5y ago
  But does it work like a Mac?
alanwreath 5y ago
Gotta give my love here! Pop OS works well. Coming a severely mixed household with Windows 11/10 (for vr and gaming), Max OS X (for work), and Linux when not gaming. I recently switched my non gaming os on my household computers from Ubuntu to PopOS. I love the auto-tiling feature, and it’s in support for nvidia cards is a very nice touch. I’m also excited to see they are investing in Rust development of the frontend. Gonna be an interesting year for sure!
lumost 5y ago
Absolutely love the work system76 is doing. My only regret is that I run pop on a Razer rather than one of their machines. Hopefully they get their in-house laptops up and running soon :)
- toastal 5y ago
  Condolences. Razer is pretty hostile towards Linux. I can't believe BIOS and firmware upgrades can only be done through a green-accented Windows 10+ GUI: opposed to upload to Linux Vendor Firmware Service, no *.bin files flashable from the BIOS, no Windows PE support, no FreeDOS.
plumeria 5y ago
Curious to see no mention of AppImage [1] next to flatpack [2]. [1] https://appimage.org/ https://appimage.org/ [2] https://flatpak.org/ https://flatpak.org/
- rzzzt 5y ago
  No Snaps or RPMs or .tar.gz archives or ebuilds or instructions for compiling from source either.
Normille 5y ago
All very pretty I'm sure. But, at the end of the day, much though I enjoy twiddling with Linux and poking around different distros, I'm stuck with MacOS because [like a lot of folks who use MacOS for work reasons and not to be 'hipster cool'] I work in the design industry and that means the Adobe suite is a must. Linux has nothing that comes close. And the customary recommendations; The Gimp and Inkscape are so pitifully awful compared to Photoshop and Illustrator that I seriously doubt the people who suggest them are professional designers, who have to work with these packages, day in and day out. So, yeah, I'm all for Linux distros which try and lift some of the elegant design cues from MacOS. But, at the end of the day, the OS is just something I use to open / edit / save and move files around. It's not where I actually get my work done.
- Shared404 5y ago
  > And the customary recommendations; The Gimp and Inkscape are so pitifully awful compared to Photoshop and Illustrator that I seriously doubt the people who suggest them are professional designers, who have to work with these packages, day in and day out. Understandable. While I do think familiarity has some impact, I picked up photoshop for the first time much faster than The Gimp, Inkscape was closer but Illustrator was still faster. For my purposes, running Linux+FL/OSS is worthwhile as a hobbyist however. I'm curious if you've tried Krita, and if so what your experience was? I found it much much much more intuitive than The Gimp.
  - Normille 5y ago
    I've tried Krita and found it quite impressively polished [dare I say 'for a Linux graphics app']. However I'd see it as more of a replacement for something like Painter or Manga Studio than Photoshop or Illustrator
- themodelplumber 5y ago
  Back about a decade ago when I was doing similar work that required Adobe tools, I used Virtualbox and really enjoyed the compromise. The desktop flexibility of XFCE was enough reason for me at the time, being kind of tired of all the third party commercial tools I was using for the same conveniences in Mac OS that didn't work as well. Turns out I also wanted to play with my work more, and I ended up writing scripts to do a lot of the work I thought I would use Adobe for. It was also pretty funny to start getting "share flowchart template pls" requests from my colleague who used InDesign, when I had created the flowcharts in LibreOffice and Inkscape. So IDK, tools and results are one thing, but fun new processes are often fun and also end up getting results that were worth it in different ways.
mukundmr 5y ago
What about security patches for the Pop _OS specific desktop components? The underlying Debian components are maintained elsewhere.
criddell 5y ago
I guess I don't get how operating systems are still something that people have such strong opinions on. All of the major operating systems are good enough or can be made good enough by installing a few packages. Pop may be great, but it's useless if you need to run Final Cut Pro. macOS is wonderful, but not if you want to play a lot of AAA games. Windows is fine, but if you are doing a lot of Ruby on Rails you may have an easier path on some Linux distro.
- sbayeta 5y ago
  I use Windows with wsl2. It's really good, specially with W11 which brings seamless integration with Linux GUI apps. Definitely worth a try.
- Hermitian909 5y ago
  > I guess I don't get how operating systems are still something that people have such strong opinions on. All of the major operating systems are good enough or can be made good enough by installing a few packages. The phrase "good enough" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here as people have different priorities. For some people, having their dev environment broken by updates is a huge negative, something MacOS has done to myself and others frequently over the past few years. Others, like myself, don't care so much and so indeed MacOS is "good enough" for me but certainly not for everyone.
- marcodiego 5y ago
  > I don't get how operating systems are still something that people have such strong opinions on. When there is FLOSS, it is very common to also have feelings and ideology mixed in. It is very common for "FLOSS people" to evaluate software beyond familiarity and technical merits.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  It's all about what you want in an OS. MacOS for example is very much one size fits all. For someone like me who wants to tune the nuts and bolts of the system is frustrating. Windows is better at this and Linux of course shines depending on which distro you pick. I consider each distro its own OS. For the same reason gnome doesn't work for me (and thus PopOS doesn't) but KDE and i3 do. But other people have other priorities. And the software you want to run heavily factors into it.
AzzieElbab 5y ago
Switched to PopOs from Fedora kde/xmonad mix. Their tiling manager is functional enough for me and best of all I do not have to maintain my own desktop
icambron 5y ago
I bought a desktop from System76 (it's wonderful) so I gave Pop_os a spin. It's pretty clean but there were just too many little things that didn't _quite_ work right. Customizing keyboard shortcuts never quite got me what I wanted. UI elements in the status bar that would stop being clickable. Buggy config screens. I eventually gave up. I love the idea and I wish them the best of luck, but as of a couple months ago, they weren't there yet.
- Sosh101 5y ago
  I've been using it as my main OS for nearly 3 years now, without any of the problems you describe.
- astrec 5y ago
  I've run Pop!_OS on a Lenovo X395 for over 2 years, and on a custom build PC for the last year. I've have had the opposite experience -- it just works. Granted the Pop!_Shop isn't very good.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Another opinion: Pop_OS is fine and perfectly useable. I have used it for 3 years without any big issues. Sure pop_os store hangs occasionally but it times out and fixes itself and I haven't seen it doing even that in 22.10. It's fine folks, give it a try.
howdydoo 5y ago
This is a little off-topic, but I've been wanting to switch from Windows to Linux and the one thing stopping me is the lack of a good package manager. WAIT, let me explain. On Windows, you can just `scoop install ripgrep fzf jq` and you're in business. And updating all installed packages is one command away. Meanwhile on Debian, the system packages are often years out of date. So authors have started making their own custom install scripts [1], or just telling you to `curl` the binary into /usr/bin [2]. To update these manually-curled binaries you need to run a different set of steps for every one. There's no way to list outdated apps, and there's no easy way to update everything. On top of that, many apps I use aren't even packaged (k9s, broot are two random ones I just found). Sometimes you can find a third-party repo, but that's yet another person you rely on to get updates. Whereas with scoop, it fetches straight from the source, so there's never any waiting. Is there some alternative to `apt` that everyone is using? Or how do people generally deal with this? [1]: https://starship.rs/guide/ https://starship.rs/guide/ [2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep#installation https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep#installation
- jacques-andre 5y ago
  [dead]
- linux_is_nice 5y ago
  Arch Linux :)
  - ejj28 5y ago
    Indeed, after pacman and yay I'm never going back to Debian-based systems for personal use. The Arch User Repository is so much more hassle-free than trying to install stuff on Debian from 3rd-party repos.
    - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
      What gives people confidence in the security of the user repository packages?
marcodiego 5y ago
My neighbor asked me to help him get rid of windows 10 and install Ubuntu on his old (2013) laptop. I helped. It was easy and fast to install. Of course, you needed to know what is an image and how to boot from a USB device, but it was easy nonetheless. Since he doesn't depend on any windows-only software, hardware or service, I didn't expect any problem. I was particularly happy the printer (an multifunction HP Deskjet 27XX series) needed no fiddle to work, neither did its scanner. The windows driver was EXTREMELY intrusive and required an HP account. Bluetooth needed a fix: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1232159/ubuntu-20-04-no-sound-out-of-bluetooth-headphones https://askubuntu.com/questions/1232159/ubuntu-20-04-no-soun... which was the first google result and very easy to fix. After that, he was impressed that by just turning on the bluetooth speaker was enough to have the audio routed through it. Then he proceeded to install software. I then started watching like someone who is following an usability test. He googled to install chrome and asked me if he should download the .rpm or .deb, I answered he needed the .deb. Firefox downloaded it but didn't automatically opened it. I really don't know why. I also don't know if simply double-clicking it in nautilus would be enough, I just typed "dpkg -i" and that was done, but it was not the best experience in usability. This needs a fix. I then told him that he should not expect to install things the old windows way: download an installer an run it. I then showed him "Ubuntu Software". Most users these days are used to something similar to that thanks to "stores" on smartphones (note that FLOSS was a pioneer with this concept). Things then went mostly downhill from there. It is not that he couldn't install what he needed, on the contrary: he did install what he needed but "Ubuntu Software" is very very buggy! Results are duplicated without clear differentiation, you couldn't tell the state of it just by looking at it, software was installed but didn't appear immediately, there was no clue when an installation finished, first time something was run took a long time without any indication what was happening... I'm glad I'm skilled to use the command line. If linux want to have a chance on the desktop, the software installing experience still has some way to go. It is better now for novices, but still partly broken. Conclusion: Much much better but still not there yet for complete novices. The good part: I don't know if windows or mac are "already there" for complete novices either.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  you should tell him to always use the "store" for a given distro rather than googling, that's a bad idea and you can end up with malware or breaking your config. Much better to use pacman/apt/pkg/etc if you go through the command line to install. Installing bare .deb/.rpm is a really bad idea unless you are well versed on the distro and it's packaging system. I understand the pain points of stores but they are still far better than googling for it. Pop OS actually has a nice store and bug free as of the latest revision. All my version upgrades have gone well too. The only real issue I had was trying multiple desktops. If you switch from say Gnome/KDE/XFCE it is a good idea to reboot between as they do weird things to dbus and don't plan around having multiple login types going on.
im_down_w_otp 5y ago
All I want in life is a Linux distro with a package repo full of meticulously reworked & reconfigured packages that make all the keyboard shortcuts across the entire system and every application be like and be as consistent as my old Macs. I've been full-time Linux (Kubuntu) for a few years now, and I've hobbled together something that only irritates me to death about 30% of the time rather than the 100% of the time it used to before spending days and days fiddling with a bunch of different flavors of remapping at nearly every layer of the system. If I'm ever fabulously wealthy, I already know I'm just going to finance an open source fastidious spiritual successor to MacOS 10.6 I'm going to give Pop_Os a try, but I suspect I'm going to run into the same problems I always do. The trouble with Linux as a desktop for me isn't weather it's beautiful or not. The problem is how disintegrated everything is and the thousand papercuts ways in which it works. That said, I absolutely consider it basically an incredible miracle that the experience is as good as it is, frankly. So, I keep at it.
- johndoughy 5y ago
  Couldn't agree more about consistent keyboard shortcuts. It's crazy to me that mere copy/paste doesn't have a consistent keyboard shortcut across the system (eg terminal uses ctrl-shift-c or something). And if copy/paste isn't consistent, there's little hope for other shortcuts.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Ctrl-C is a break signal. When you're in the UI, ctrl-c, ctrl-x, and ctrl-v work like you would expect. How do you send a break on a mac terminal? I didn't think it was any different.
    - kitsunesoba 5y ago
      Ctrl-C is break on mac terminals too, but it’s not a problem since for Mac applications the primary modifier is command — so instead or Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for copy and paste, it’s Cmd-C and Cmd-V for everything, including the terminal.
    - 5y ago
newaccount2021 5y ago
jio232ij32ij 5y ago
ThinkBeat 5y ago
I was thinking the other day that Apple is the only company developing their operating system and devices for consumers. I am not sure where Microsofts attention is these days. They have Windows Server I am not sure how the teams are allocated anymore. The vast majority of investment and work in Linux is for what FAANG and other enterprises need. The visual sugar POP_OS adds is nice, perhaps the on Linux. But it doesnt let you run Office 365, Creative Cloud, the vast majority of photo editing tools I use, or all the nice little apps I have on the Mac. I have been running Linux since 1994, but I have not yet found it convenient replacement for my desktop. It is getting very close on the "dev / coding" side, I can make that work
- rbreaves 5y ago
  Yea, Desktop Linux is edging closer and closer. I am finding that I have been able to make go of Ubuntu Budgie w/ my kinto.sh app, sorun.me & autorandr.. which I need to the last thing to sorun.me as it is my "setup my entire desktop OS in 5 minutes or less" script. Autorandr is amazing.. and I am also making betterScale atm to help hiDPI laptop users scale their Gnome based or Budgie based DE w/ or w/o mixed lo and hi dpi monitors.
mindcrime 5y ago
I can't say much about the MacOS side of things (I do use a Mac at my day-job, but only because the choice is Mac or Windows, no Linux option). But as far as PopOS goes... I've been using it full-time on my personal laptop for several months now, and I'm very happy. Surprisingly so, you might say. Why "surprising?" Well TBH, I always looked at PopOS as kind of a niche / oddball thing, along with any other distro that exists only because a device manufacturer is pushing it. I had assumed that when I got my System76 box I'd immediately install Fedora or something. But when it got here I felt too lazy to do that on "day zero" so I figured "Aaah, heck, I'll keep this PopOS thing around until I get some spare time, then I'll do a reinstall." Fast forward 6+ months now and I'm still running PopOS and am pretty happy with it. It mostly "just works" and I have access to basically all of the same packages as Ubuntu so everything I've needed to install (modulo a very small number) has been right at my fingertips, a quick "apt install" away. Net-net, if anybody out there is thinking of trying PopOS, I'd encourage you to give it a whirl. Note: I am not associated with PopOS or System76 in any way, aside from being a System76 customer. I have no financial stake in this discussion.
- azangru 5y ago
  Which System76 laptop are you using, and how has your experience been with it?
  - mindcrime 5y ago
    I went with a Gazelle. I splurged a little bit and got 32GB of RAM, and both a NVMe drive and an SSD, so I have both plenty of RAM and plenty of fast storage. By and large I am extremely satisfied with this box so far. The only thing I really don't like, and this is admittedly a pretty subjective thing, is the layout of the keyboard vis-a-vis the right shift key. I prefer a full-length shift key, above the arrow keys. This has a smaller shift key, which is just to the left of the up arrow key and above the left arrow key. It's a minor nit, but it's not as convenient to the way I like to use the shift and arrow keys together for selecting text.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    I have a Galago Pro and in general I like it. some drawbacks I see: - Terrible battery life - Sound quality and volume not very good - Problems with suspend/wake and fan control. The fan turns on when a USB-C is connected and the device is in suspend mode. Sometimes the fan goes into super turbo mode at night and can only be stopped with a hard reset. This one really bugs me and I would like system76 to fix it Otherwise I like the machine. Display is good. I like the keyboard better than on my Macbook 2019. Trackpad works surprisingly well.
sandreas 5y ago
Distro does not matter as much too me like Desktop Environment or Window Manager. I tried many distributions, in the end, I got back Fedora but then to Ubuntu (mostly because of the ZFS on Root thing and everything works out of the box experience). Artix was pretty good, but KDE and krohnkite was "too customizable" for me and dwm to less desktop environment. BTW: If someone would like to have a tiling window manager on MacOS, try Amethyst[1]. Pretty awesome ;) [1]: https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst
brundolf 5y ago
Wow, this documentation is incredibly thoughtfully-done. It's wonderful to see a Linux distro give this much attention to holistic user-experience for regular people (going beyond just the UI itself)
parkingrift 5y ago
Weird comparisons. On the left we have first party apps by Apple, and on the right we have whatever you want to download from the internet. Particularly egregious for things on the right that are also available on the left, which is most of them.
- drdec 5y ago
  It's not a comparison. It's a guide for getting tasks done on Pop!_OS for people who are used to macOS. It's like those guides for replacing jQuery with vanilla JavaScript. Of course the vanilla JavaScript is available for people using jQuery, but that's not the point.
  - parkingrift 5y ago
    People who are used to macOS aren’t using macOS default applications. The comparisons make no sense.
chris_wot 5y ago
Love to see a comparison of Gnome and MacOS.
shortformblog 5y ago
This doesn’t mention the Mac’s approach to special characters, which is actually pretty doable in Pop_OS! if you set the keyboard as English (Macintosh) and set up Gnome Tweaks so that the Windows key is set as the third-level keys. (I generally move the Win key to the Caps Lock for my use case.) Pop_OS! is a decent Linux OS for switchers, though I recently switched to Garuda Linux as my secondary Linux OS and am finding it a good balance.
dmitriid 5y ago
It's somewhat weird that many of the "alternatives" listed are also available on MacOS. Or that in the games section Steam is listed for both MacOS and PopOS (whereas Spotify or VS Code are only listed for PopOS). Otherwise it's a nice high-level overview
mark_l_watson 5y ago
The two most expensive laptops that I have purchased are a Systems76 and a MacBook Pro. Great value on both counts. I don't find the Pop_OS desktop to be as easy to use as macOS, but it is good enough. Off topic, but as I approach my 71st birthday, and I will probably totally retire in a year or two, I have thought of simplifying my gear, and one thing I am sure of is that the only laptop I will want is a Chromebook with Linux containers. Otherwise in an Apple Watch and Apple iTV box is likely all I will need. For tech experiments, a Pro account on Google Colab (good GPU support) is likely all I will will need.
cmurf 5y ago
Option-u (or e) followed by any Latin letter and you get that letter with umlaut or accent. Things like that I miss from macOS. I still have no idea how to do that on GNOME.
- petepete 5y ago
  It's actually pretty straightforward, you just need to enable a compose key, then press it followed by punctuation then a letter to insert a special character For example, <compose> ” e = ë https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/tips-specialchars.html.en https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/tips-specialc...
mavhc 5y ago
Another Linux article for beginners that pretends everyone knows what the Super key is, a key that no one has on their keyboard.
buzzdenver 5y ago
I really tried by getting a nice System76 laptop from work, but PopOS is orders of magnitude more fragile for me than my Mac-s. In a couple of years of using it I've had my screen have random images drawn on it by the graphics driver, closing the screen without putting the laptop in sleep mode often ends up in having to reboot, my battery had to be replaced after 18 months just to mention the major issues. After upgrading to PopOS 21.10, my screen shuts off after 30 seconds idle time, and the launcher got reworked so that the first thing that comes up is not my curated list of apps. It feels like a Linux desktop from old times...
arvinsim 5y ago
I used Pop_OS last year to test Linux for general desktop use. Despite it's flaws, I really enjoyed using it unlike the last time I used Linux distros in the 2000s. The only reason I ultimately went back to Windows on the desktop is because Linux doesn't support Ableton. It's a shame since Pop_OS was easily the better environment for software development.
walrus01 5y ago
On a linux desktop I actually don't want something that tries too hard to copy MacOS. I want a traditional desktop metaphor not very different from KDE2. The closest thing right now is something like ordinary xorg + XFCE4 + all of the XFCE4 additional packages. XFCE4 is small, clean and minimalist enough that it's entirely unobtrusive as a linux desktop GUI. With sufficient customization of the taskbar, and multi-desktop switcher, it's the best I've found so far.
sh4un 5y ago
After using almost every serious distro over the last 25 years, I would have to say Fedora and OpenSUSE are top notch.
dudeinhawaii 5y ago
Pop_OS looks interesting! Quick note to the system76 guys, I think the Digital Audio Workstation section seems off. Audacity is a great tool but it has more in common with a basic SoundRecorder app than LogicPro or GarageBand. It's more of a great utility that you use in addition to those. I think you missed Gimp vs Photoshop as a great comparison as well as Blender vs Autodesk tools for 3D modeling and rendering. All in all this is a great reminder of how far Desktop linux has come and how narrow the software gap is. In some cases, the Linux options are better or as fully-fledged while also being free\unencumbered.
gtsop 5y ago
Perfect? No. Awesome? Yes. Currently using pop os for all my desktop-type computing (gaming, coding, casual web, etc). The true sign that it is awesome is that I feel confident again (after quite a few years) to suggest non-technical people (mom, grandma type of people) to install linux on their main system, because I know I will get far less calls saying "I can't do this". And when I do get these calls they will be easier to address.
hyperionplays 5y ago
How does Pop compare to ElementaryOS?
itsjloh 5y ago
Has anyone been able to successfully resolve screen tearing with nVidia graphics cards on linux? I have a nVidia 1070 with a beefy AMD Ryzen 7 3700X that I would love to use as a daily driver but I just can't stand scrolling in FF on it. I constantly get tearing and other artifacts that make it so frustrating to use I give up. I've tried every tutorial I can find on the net, every CLI flag etc. Nothing seems to work!
mpcannabrava 5y ago
I'm a very happy Pop OS user for the last year and other Linux flavors long before that. Windows as a kid because where I grew up the Apple ecosystem is just prohibitively expensive. OSS is the future, please support it. Apple won't be around forever, OSS will. The work System76 is doing is phenomenal.

342 points by zathan 5y ago

I find the branding of the gigantic P and the exclamation point, when used as a backdrop, to be excessively distracting from the content in the foreground.

super_linear 5y ago
Also find it hard to read the article since I see "Pop!_OS" and think they're trying to emphasize something
- ourdramadotnet 5y ago
  "PopOS" with no punctuation seems a lot cleaner.
- allenu 5y ago
  This is my first time reading about this OS and the naming is very strange to me. I don't understand why they decided to go with "!_" in the middle. It feels a little too techy for a mainstream user. Why not PopOS or Pop OS?
  - periheli0n 5y ago
    Maybe there's a German on the team who insisted on visually splitting the "Pop" from the "OS". "Popos" is German for "booties".
  - Shared404 5y ago
    > It feels a little too techy for a mainstream user. To be fair, they market themselves as "Pop!_OS is an operating system for STEM and creative professionals who use their computer as a tool to discover and create." on the main page for the OS. I'll admit, I don't love the !_ but for the opposite reason - it feels faux techy to me.
  - stjohnswarts 5y ago
    It's just branding, PopOS or popos is what most people type Do Not use the pop!_os when searching for related info or you'll get far fewer hits.

EB-Barrington 5y ago

Wanted to read this link, but 404: https://support.system76.com/articles/Pop!_OS-20.04-LTS-Release-Notes https://support.system76.com/articles/Pop!_OS-20.04-LTS-Rele...

zenlf 5y ago

After my previous Linux experience with Ubuntu 10 years ago, I gave pop os a try last year and was surprised how good it was. I think the engineers at System76 really know what they are doing and am excited about their new DE.

timbit42 5y ago
So you're comparing current pop os to Ubuntu 10 years ago?
- rzzzt 5y ago
  Are they? I only see two events mentioned, with 9 years in between.

bitigchi 5y ago

This makes it sound like only Pop_OS! has the applications listed for it and they are not available for macOS. It's also funny that macOS has application installs sorted and the Pop_OS side starts listing paths. :))

multiplegeorges 5y ago

Is it finally the year of Linux on the desktop? But seriously, the work System76 is doing is really great. PopOS is really nice to use. The attention it is getting is well deserved.

coldtea 5y ago
>Is it finally the year of Linux on the desktop? Considering that the hope behind this term was about winning the desktop user share from Windows, and not just "being usable" on the desktop, or "being used" on the desktop, no.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Now that Windows 11 is a thing, I think winning desktop user share from Windows will be easier than ever before. What else is the average Joe going to do with their TPM-less devices?
  - nebula8804 5y ago
    Throw them in the trash and buy a new PC. They are pretty cheap.
    - ejj28 5y ago
      Having worked at an independent PC repair shop, there are a lot of people who would rather keep using their old 6+ year old laptops and have SSDs installed in them than go out and buy a new laptop. Yeah there are cheap ones for sale, but they're underpowered, have regular old HDDs, and only 4GB of RAM. Plus, now they're coming with Windows 11 preinstalled, which will annoy a lot of people who are used to Windows 7 or 10.
      - marcodiego 5y ago
        6+ year old laptops run very decently with 8gb RAM, a SSD and a modern linux distro.

zibzab 5y ago

This is the distro that LTT used to test Linux gaming, right?

smoldesu 5y ago
Wrong distro, this is the one where he typed "Yes, do as I say!" into the console verbatim to uninstall his desktop environment...
- _dain_ 5y ago
  that chain of events should never have happened in the first place.
rPlayer6554 5y ago
Linus tried it but had an issue where installing steam wiped his DE. He switched to Manjaro and Luke used Mint.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Not paying attention while installing steam wiped his desktop. TBF though he isn't that used to using Linux as a desktop. Manjaro did go much smoother for him.
  - rPlayer6554 5y ago
    Linus tried to make the point that on windows you don't have to pay close attention when doing something minor like installing Steam. Because why should something like that ever even have the potential to remove your desktop environment? (*On a system meant for the common consumer that is not an expert in the domain*) Yes he didn't pay attention to the warning, but in fairness Linux gives a lot of warnings. Sudo gives a warning when you first use it, and that's clearly used all the time. To you and I who know what "gnome-de" is (or whatever the package name is) the warning is clear. But to someone new to the space, DE is not a commonly used acronym.
5y ago

sam0x17 5y ago

PopOS is nice, but I still find that nothing beats Budgie as far as Ubuntu distros go. Just way cleaner UI than anything else out there.

upbeat_general 5y ago

Having switched from macOS to PopOS very recently, it’s been pretty smooth. My only real issue is that Remote Desktop support is worse than macOS which is itself far worse than Windows RDP. I know it’s a Linux/Debian wide problem, but I’d really like someone to step up and bundle something polished out of the box.

flatiron 5y ago
Vnc? I think most people use ssh for remote for Linux which is why it probably doesn’t get much love
- upbeat_general 5y ago
  Vnc works for the basic use case of viewing a remote screen. It’s a mess for interactive use, especially with the default implementations you can find on Linux imo. macOS’s built in screen sharing is the only vnc server/client combo that has acceptable latency but even it fails to support basic features like dynamic resolution for different clients. And I agree that SSH is definitely far more common; I of course use SSH but there are lots of reasons why an interactive desktop is either required, or just far more convenient.
  - arsome 5y ago
    X forwarding via compressed SSH (ssh -XC) is likely the simplest bet, especially now that WSL has good support for it, if you need more advanced remote desktop you can take a look at x2go which is based on NoMachine's NX protocol.
    - upbeat_general 5y ago
      I’m currently using NoMachine with their custom server/client. X forwarding via SSH only works for single applications and not an entire desktop correct?
  - jeroenhd 5y ago
    It took me (way too much) effort but I managed to get a pretty stable and smooth RDP server set up on my desktop. Sadly, GNOME3 and RDP don't work well together, so it broke after a random upgrade and hasn't worked since. You used to be able to use X11 forwarding quite well, but most tools I use tend to render their entire screens as a canvas causing way too many unnecessary updates. Wayland also makes it nearly impossible to do this on a modern system without compatibility layers. When RDP on Linux works, it works pretty well. I'd love for someone in the GNOME team to find a way to make RDP compatible and easier to set up. There's a VNC setting in the settings somewhere, but VNC is pretty insecure and terrible for interactive work.

kevinak 5y ago

I recently installed Pop_OS on a new Workstation and wanted it to look and feel like MacOS as much as possible. It's surprisingly easy. You can even make Firefox look like Safari if that's your jazz. Here's what I used: https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme

heavyset_go 5y ago
I've always found the small instances where macOS Linux themes and actual macOS diverge annoying. To me, themes that use patterns and idioms that were instead inspired by, and not copied from, macOS are a happy medium.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  As much as I enjoy the heritage of Linux theming, I do have to agree with you. A lot of it comes down to a difference in HIG, and as you've suggested, the quality of a theme mostly comes down to how well it works with those constraints. Normally I'm pretty unimpressed (those Big Sur themes have a real chicken-and-egg feel to them), but the few themes that I've seen that go out of their way to make a good, Mac-like experience are Nordic[0] (my personal fav and daily driver), Prof [1], and Juno [2]. [0] https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1267246/ https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1267246/ [1] https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1334194/ https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1334194/ [2] https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1280977/ https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1280977/
user_7832 5y ago
> https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme Thanks for this! I didn't realize that such a thing existed.
akoncius 5y ago
https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/ might be interesting to you if not looked already
robertoandred 5y ago
But does it work like a Mac?

alanwreath 5y ago

Gotta give my love here! Pop OS works well. Coming a severely mixed household with Windows 11/10 (for vr and gaming), Max OS X (for work), and Linux when not gaming. I recently switched my non gaming os on my household computers from Ubuntu to PopOS. I love the auto-tiling feature, and it’s in support for nvidia cards is a very nice touch. I’m also excited to see they are investing in Rust development of the frontend. Gonna be an interesting year for sure!

lumost 5y ago

Absolutely love the work system76 is doing. My only regret is that I run pop on a Razer rather than one of their machines. Hopefully they get their in-house laptops up and running soon :)

toastal 5y ago
Condolences. Razer is pretty hostile towards Linux. I can't believe BIOS and firmware upgrades can only be done through a green-accented Windows 10+ GUI: opposed to upload to Linux Vendor Firmware Service, no *.bin files flashable from the BIOS, no Windows PE support, no FreeDOS.

plumeria 5y ago

Curious to see no mention of AppImage [1] next to flatpack [2]. [1] https://appimage.org/ https://appimage.org/ [2] https://flatpak.org/ https://flatpak.org/

rzzzt 5y ago
No Snaps or RPMs or .tar.gz archives or ebuilds or instructions for compiling from source either.

Normille 5y ago

All very pretty I'm sure. But, at the end of the day, much though I enjoy twiddling with Linux and poking around different distros, I'm stuck with MacOS because [like a lot of folks who use MacOS for work reasons and not to be 'hipster cool'] I work in the design industry and that means the Adobe suite is a must. Linux has nothing that comes close. And the customary recommendations; The Gimp and Inkscape are so pitifully awful compared to Photoshop and Illustrator that I seriously doubt the people who suggest them are professional designers, who have to work with these packages, day in and day out. So, yeah, I'm all for Linux distros which try and lift some of the elegant design cues from MacOS. But, at the end of the day, the OS is just something I use to open / edit / save and move files around. It's not where I actually get my work done.

Shared404 5y ago
> And the customary recommendations; The Gimp and Inkscape are so pitifully awful compared to Photoshop and Illustrator that I seriously doubt the people who suggest them are professional designers, who have to work with these packages, day in and day out. Understandable. While I do think familiarity has some impact, I picked up photoshop for the first time much faster than The Gimp, Inkscape was closer but Illustrator was still faster. For my purposes, running Linux+FL/OSS is worthwhile as a hobbyist however. I'm curious if you've tried Krita, and if so what your experience was? I found it much much much more intuitive than The Gimp.
- Normille 5y ago
  I've tried Krita and found it quite impressively polished [dare I say 'for a Linux graphics app']. However I'd see it as more of a replacement for something like Painter or Manga Studio than Photoshop or Illustrator
themodelplumber 5y ago
Back about a decade ago when I was doing similar work that required Adobe tools, I used Virtualbox and really enjoyed the compromise. The desktop flexibility of XFCE was enough reason for me at the time, being kind of tired of all the third party commercial tools I was using for the same conveniences in Mac OS that didn't work as well. Turns out I also wanted to play with my work more, and I ended up writing scripts to do a lot of the work I thought I would use Adobe for. It was also pretty funny to start getting "share flowchart template pls" requests from my colleague who used InDesign, when I had created the flowcharts in LibreOffice and Inkscape. So IDK, tools and results are one thing, but fun new processes are often fun and also end up getting results that were worth it in different ways.

mukundmr 5y ago

What about security patches for the Pop _OS specific desktop components? The underlying Debian components are maintained elsewhere.

criddell 5y ago

I guess I don't get how operating systems are still something that people have such strong opinions on. All of the major operating systems are good enough or can be made good enough by installing a few packages. Pop may be great, but it's useless if you need to run Final Cut Pro. macOS is wonderful, but not if you want to play a lot of AAA games. Windows is fine, but if you are doing a lot of Ruby on Rails you may have an easier path on some Linux distro.

sbayeta 5y ago
I use Windows with wsl2. It's really good, specially with W11 which brings seamless integration with Linux GUI apps. Definitely worth a try.
Hermitian909 5y ago
> I guess I don't get how operating systems are still something that people have such strong opinions on. All of the major operating systems are good enough or can be made good enough by installing a few packages. The phrase "good enough" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here as people have different priorities. For some people, having their dev environment broken by updates is a huge negative, something MacOS has done to myself and others frequently over the past few years. Others, like myself, don't care so much and so indeed MacOS is "good enough" for me but certainly not for everyone.
marcodiego 5y ago
> I don't get how operating systems are still something that people have such strong opinions on. When there is FLOSS, it is very common to also have feelings and ideology mixed in. It is very common for "FLOSS people" to evaluate software beyond familiarity and technical merits.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
It's all about what you want in an OS. MacOS for example is very much one size fits all. For someone like me who wants to tune the nuts and bolts of the system is frustrating. Windows is better at this and Linux of course shines depending on which distro you pick. I consider each distro its own OS. For the same reason gnome doesn't work for me (and thus PopOS doesn't) but KDE and i3 do. But other people have other priorities. And the software you want to run heavily factors into it.

AzzieElbab 5y ago

Switched to PopOs from Fedora kde/xmonad mix. Their tiling manager is functional enough for me and best of all I do not have to maintain my own desktop

icambron 5y ago

I bought a desktop from System76 (it's wonderful) so I gave Pop_os a spin. It's pretty clean but there were just too many little things that didn't _quite_ work right. Customizing keyboard shortcuts never quite got me what I wanted. UI elements in the status bar that would stop being clickable. Buggy config screens. I eventually gave up. I love the idea and I wish them the best of luck, but as of a couple months ago, they weren't there yet.

Sosh101 5y ago
I've been using it as my main OS for nearly 3 years now, without any of the problems you describe.
astrec 5y ago
I've run Pop!_OS on a Lenovo X395 for over 2 years, and on a custom build PC for the last year. I've have had the opposite experience -- it just works. Granted the Pop!_Shop isn't very good.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Another opinion: Pop_OS is fine and perfectly useable. I have used it for 3 years without any big issues. Sure pop_os store hangs occasionally but it times out and fixes itself and I haven't seen it doing even that in 22.10. It's fine folks, give it a try.

howdydoo 5y ago

This is a little off-topic, but I've been wanting to switch from Windows to Linux and the one thing stopping me is the lack of a good package manager. WAIT, let me explain. On Windows, you can just `scoop install ripgrep fzf jq` and you're in business. And updating all installed packages is one command away. Meanwhile on Debian, the system packages are often years out of date. So authors have started making their own custom install scripts [1], or just telling you to `curl` the binary into /usr/bin [2]. To update these manually-curled binaries you need to run a different set of steps for every one. There's no way to list outdated apps, and there's no easy way to update everything. On top of that, many apps I use aren't even packaged (k9s, broot are two random ones I just found). Sometimes you can find a third-party repo, but that's yet another person you rely on to get updates. Whereas with scoop, it fetches straight from the source, so there's never any waiting. Is there some alternative to `apt` that everyone is using? Or how do people generally deal with this? [1]: https://starship.rs/guide/ https://starship.rs/guide/ [2]: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep#installation https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep#installation

jacques-andre 5y ago
[dead]
linux_is_nice 5y ago
Arch Linux :)
- ejj28 5y ago
  Indeed, after pacman and yay I'm never going back to Debian-based systems for personal use. The Arch User Repository is so much more hassle-free than trying to install stuff on Debian from 3rd-party repos.
  - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
    What gives people confidence in the security of the user repository packages?

marcodiego 5y ago

My neighbor asked me to help him get rid of windows 10 and install Ubuntu on his old (2013) laptop. I helped. It was easy and fast to install. Of course, you needed to know what is an image and how to boot from a USB device, but it was easy nonetheless. Since he doesn't depend on any windows-only software, hardware or service, I didn't expect any problem. I was particularly happy the printer (an multifunction HP Deskjet 27XX series) needed no fiddle to work, neither did its scanner. The windows driver was EXTREMELY intrusive and required an HP account. Bluetooth needed a fix: https://askubuntu.com/questions/1232159/ubuntu-20-04-no-sound-out-of-bluetooth-headphones https://askubuntu.com/questions/1232159/ubuntu-20-04-no-soun... which was the first google result and very easy to fix. After that, he was impressed that by just turning on the bluetooth speaker was enough to have the audio routed through it. Then he proceeded to install software. I then started watching like someone who is following an usability test. He googled to install chrome and asked me if he should download the .rpm or .deb, I answered he needed the .deb. Firefox downloaded it but didn't automatically opened it. I really don't know why. I also don't know if simply double-clicking it in nautilus would be enough, I just typed "dpkg -i" and that was done, but it was not the best experience in usability. This needs a fix. I then told him that he should not expect to install things the old windows way: download an installer an run it. I then showed him "Ubuntu Software". Most users these days are used to something similar to that thanks to "stores" on smartphones (note that FLOSS was a pioneer with this concept). Things then went mostly downhill from there. It is not that he couldn't install what he needed, on the contrary: he did install what he needed but "Ubuntu Software" is very very buggy! Results are duplicated without clear differentiation, you couldn't tell the state of it just by looking at it, software was installed but didn't appear immediately, there was no clue when an installation finished, first time something was run took a long time without any indication what was happening... I'm glad I'm skilled to use the command line. If linux want to have a chance on the desktop, the software installing experience still has some way to go. It is better now for novices, but still partly broken. Conclusion: Much much better but still not there yet for complete novices. The good part: I don't know if windows or mac are "already there" for complete novices either.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
you should tell him to always use the "store" for a given distro rather than googling, that's a bad idea and you can end up with malware or breaking your config. Much better to use pacman/apt/pkg/etc if you go through the command line to install. Installing bare .deb/.rpm is a really bad idea unless you are well versed on the distro and it's packaging system. I understand the pain points of stores but they are still far better than googling for it. Pop OS actually has a nice store and bug free as of the latest revision. All my version upgrades have gone well too. The only real issue I had was trying multiple desktops. If you switch from say Gnome/KDE/XFCE it is a good idea to reboot between as they do weird things to dbus and don't plan around having multiple login types going on.

im_down_w_otp 5y ago

All I want in life is a Linux distro with a package repo full of meticulously reworked & reconfigured packages that make all the keyboard shortcuts across the entire system and every application be like and be as consistent as my old Macs. I've been full-time Linux (Kubuntu) for a few years now, and I've hobbled together something that only irritates me to death about 30% of the time rather than the 100% of the time it used to before spending days and days fiddling with a bunch of different flavors of remapping at nearly every layer of the system. If I'm ever fabulously wealthy, I already know I'm just going to finance an open source fastidious spiritual successor to MacOS 10.6 I'm going to give Pop_Os a try, but I suspect I'm going to run into the same problems I always do. The trouble with Linux as a desktop for me isn't weather it's beautiful or not. The problem is how disintegrated everything is and the thousand papercuts ways in which it works. That said, I absolutely consider it basically an incredible miracle that the experience is as good as it is, frankly. So, I keep at it.

johndoughy 5y ago
Couldn't agree more about consistent keyboard shortcuts. It's crazy to me that mere copy/paste doesn't have a consistent keyboard shortcut across the system (eg terminal uses ctrl-shift-c or something). And if copy/paste isn't consistent, there's little hope for other shortcuts.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Ctrl-C is a break signal. When you're in the UI, ctrl-c, ctrl-x, and ctrl-v work like you would expect. How do you send a break on a mac terminal? I didn't think it was any different.
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    Ctrl-C is break on mac terminals too, but it’s not a problem since for Mac applications the primary modifier is command — so instead or Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for copy and paste, it’s Cmd-C and Cmd-V for everything, including the terminal.
  - 5y ago

newaccount2021 5y ago

jio232ij32ij 5y ago

ThinkBeat 5y ago

I was thinking the other day that Apple is the only company developing their operating system and devices for consumers. I am not sure where Microsofts attention is these days. They have Windows Server I am not sure how the teams are allocated anymore. The vast majority of investment and work in Linux is for what FAANG and other enterprises need. The visual sugar POP_OS adds is nice, perhaps the on Linux. But it doesnt let you run Office 365, Creative Cloud, the vast majority of photo editing tools I use, or all the nice little apps I have on the Mac. I have been running Linux since 1994, but I have not yet found it convenient replacement for my desktop. It is getting very close on the "dev / coding" side, I can make that work

rbreaves 5y ago
Yea, Desktop Linux is edging closer and closer. I am finding that I have been able to make go of Ubuntu Budgie w/ my kinto.sh app, sorun.me & autorandr.. which I need to the last thing to sorun.me as it is my "setup my entire desktop OS in 5 minutes or less" script. Autorandr is amazing.. and I am also making betterScale atm to help hiDPI laptop users scale their Gnome based or Budgie based DE w/ or w/o mixed lo and hi dpi monitors.

mindcrime 5y ago

I can't say much about the MacOS side of things (I do use a Mac at my day-job, but only because the choice is Mac or Windows, no Linux option). But as far as PopOS goes... I've been using it full-time on my personal laptop for several months now, and I'm very happy. Surprisingly so, you might say. Why "surprising?" Well TBH, I always looked at PopOS as kind of a niche / oddball thing, along with any other distro that exists only because a device manufacturer is pushing it. I had assumed that when I got my System76 box I'd immediately install Fedora or something. But when it got here I felt too lazy to do that on "day zero" so I figured "Aaah, heck, I'll keep this PopOS thing around until I get some spare time, then I'll do a reinstall." Fast forward 6+ months now and I'm still running PopOS and am pretty happy with it. It mostly "just works" and I have access to basically all of the same packages as Ubuntu so everything I've needed to install (modulo a very small number) has been right at my fingertips, a quick "apt install" away. Net-net, if anybody out there is thinking of trying PopOS, I'd encourage you to give it a whirl. Note: I am not associated with PopOS or System76 in any way, aside from being a System76 customer. I have no financial stake in this discussion.

azangru 5y ago
Which System76 laptop are you using, and how has your experience been with it?
- mindcrime 5y ago
  I went with a Gazelle. I splurged a little bit and got 32GB of RAM, and both a NVMe drive and an SSD, so I have both plenty of RAM and plenty of fast storage. By and large I am extremely satisfied with this box so far. The only thing I really don't like, and this is admittedly a pretty subjective thing, is the layout of the keyboard vis-a-vis the right shift key. I prefer a full-length shift key, above the arrow keys. This has a smaller shift key, which is just to the left of the up arrow key and above the left arrow key. It's a minor nit, but it's not as convenient to the way I like to use the shift and arrow keys together for selecting text.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  I have a Galago Pro and in general I like it. some drawbacks I see: - Terrible battery life - Sound quality and volume not very good - Problems with suspend/wake and fan control. The fan turns on when a USB-C is connected and the device is in suspend mode. Sometimes the fan goes into super turbo mode at night and can only be stopped with a hard reset. This one really bugs me and I would like system76 to fix it Otherwise I like the machine. Display is good. I like the keyboard better than on my Macbook 2019. Trackpad works surprisingly well.

sandreas 5y ago

Distro does not matter as much too me like Desktop Environment or Window Manager. I tried many distributions, in the end, I got back Fedora but then to Ubuntu (mostly because of the ZFS on Root thing and everything works out of the box experience). Artix was pretty good, but KDE and krohnkite was "too customizable" for me and dwm to less desktop environment. BTW: If someone would like to have a tiling window manager on MacOS, try Amethyst[1]. Pretty awesome ;) [1]: https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst

brundolf 5y ago

Wow, this documentation is incredibly thoughtfully-done. It's wonderful to see a Linux distro give this much attention to holistic user-experience for regular people (going beyond just the UI itself)

parkingrift 5y ago

Weird comparisons. On the left we have first party apps by Apple, and on the right we have whatever you want to download from the internet. Particularly egregious for things on the right that are also available on the left, which is most of them.

drdec 5y ago
It's not a comparison. It's a guide for getting tasks done on Pop!_OS for people who are used to macOS. It's like those guides for replacing jQuery with vanilla JavaScript. Of course the vanilla JavaScript is available for people using jQuery, but that's not the point.
- parkingrift 5y ago
  People who are used to macOS aren’t using macOS default applications. The comparisons make no sense.

chris_wot 5y ago

Love to see a comparison of Gnome and MacOS.

shortformblog 5y ago

This doesn’t mention the Mac’s approach to special characters, which is actually pretty doable in Pop_OS! if you set the keyboard as English (Macintosh) and set up Gnome Tweaks so that the Windows key is set as the third-level keys. (I generally move the Win key to the Caps Lock for my use case.) Pop_OS! is a decent Linux OS for switchers, though I recently switched to Garuda Linux as my secondary Linux OS and am finding it a good balance.

dmitriid 5y ago

It's somewhat weird that many of the "alternatives" listed are also available on MacOS. Or that in the games section Steam is listed for both MacOS and PopOS (whereas Spotify or VS Code are only listed for PopOS). Otherwise it's a nice high-level overview

mark_l_watson 5y ago

The two most expensive laptops that I have purchased are a Systems76 and a MacBook Pro. Great value on both counts. I don't find the Pop_OS desktop to be as easy to use as macOS, but it is good enough. Off topic, but as I approach my 71st birthday, and I will probably totally retire in a year or two, I have thought of simplifying my gear, and one thing I am sure of is that the only laptop I will want is a Chromebook with Linux containers. Otherwise in an Apple Watch and Apple iTV box is likely all I will need. For tech experiments, a Pro account on Google Colab (good GPU support) is likely all I will will need.

cmurf 5y ago

Option-u (or e) followed by any Latin letter and you get that letter with umlaut or accent. Things like that I miss from macOS. I still have no idea how to do that on GNOME.

petepete 5y ago
It's actually pretty straightforward, you just need to enable a compose key, then press it followed by punctuation then a letter to insert a special character For example, <compose> ” e = ë https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/tips-specialchars.html.en https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/tips-specialc...

mavhc 5y ago

Another Linux article for beginners that pretends everyone knows what the Super key is, a key that no one has on their keyboard.

buzzdenver 5y ago

I really tried by getting a nice System76 laptop from work, but PopOS is orders of magnitude more fragile for me than my Mac-s. In a couple of years of using it I've had my screen have random images drawn on it by the graphics driver, closing the screen without putting the laptop in sleep mode often ends up in having to reboot, my battery had to be replaced after 18 months just to mention the major issues. After upgrading to PopOS 21.10, my screen shuts off after 30 seconds idle time, and the launcher got reworked so that the first thing that comes up is not my curated list of apps. It feels like a Linux desktop from old times...

arvinsim 5y ago

I used Pop_OS last year to test Linux for general desktop use. Despite it's flaws, I really enjoyed using it unlike the last time I used Linux distros in the 2000s. The only reason I ultimately went back to Windows on the desktop is because Linux doesn't support Ableton. It's a shame since Pop_OS was easily the better environment for software development.

walrus01 5y ago

On a linux desktop I actually don't want something that tries too hard to copy MacOS. I want a traditional desktop metaphor not very different from KDE2. The closest thing right now is something like ordinary xorg + XFCE4 + all of the XFCE4 additional packages. XFCE4 is small, clean and minimalist enough that it's entirely unobtrusive as a linux desktop GUI. With sufficient customization of the taskbar, and multi-desktop switcher, it's the best I've found so far.

sh4un 5y ago

After using almost every serious distro over the last 25 years, I would have to say Fedora and OpenSUSE are top notch.

dudeinhawaii 5y ago

Pop_OS looks interesting! Quick note to the system76 guys, I think the Digital Audio Workstation section seems off. Audacity is a great tool but it has more in common with a basic SoundRecorder app than LogicPro or GarageBand. It's more of a great utility that you use in addition to those. I think you missed Gimp vs Photoshop as a great comparison as well as Blender vs Autodesk tools for 3D modeling and rendering. All in all this is a great reminder of how far Desktop linux has come and how narrow the software gap is. In some cases, the Linux options are better or as fully-fledged while also being free\unencumbered.

gtsop 5y ago

Perfect? No. Awesome? Yes. Currently using pop os for all my desktop-type computing (gaming, coding, casual web, etc). The true sign that it is awesome is that I feel confident again (after quite a few years) to suggest non-technical people (mom, grandma type of people) to install linux on their main system, because I know I will get far less calls saying "I can't do this". And when I do get these calls they will be easier to address.

hyperionplays 5y ago

How does Pop compare to ElementaryOS?

itsjloh 5y ago

Has anyone been able to successfully resolve screen tearing with nVidia graphics cards on linux? I have a nVidia 1070 with a beefy AMD Ryzen 7 3700X that I would love to use as a daily driver but I just can't stand scrolling in FF on it. I constantly get tearing and other artifacts that make it so frustrating to use I give up. I've tried every tutorial I can find on the net, every CLI flag etc. Nothing seems to work!

mpcannabrava 5y ago

I'm a very happy Pop OS user for the last year and other Linux flavors long before that. Windows as a kid because where I grew up the Apple ecosystem is just prohibitively expensive. OSS is the future, please support it. Apple won't be around forever, OSS will. The work System76 is doing is phenomenal.