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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There are also other factors at play I believe than just resolution. I have 3 XPS 13 laptops - one Full HD matte, one Full HD glossy and one 4K glossy.
Full HD matte seems quite unsharp compared to the Full HD (or 4K) glossy. But with my eyes, I don't really see the difference between Full HD glossy and 4K glossy.
Matte screen by its nature desharpens so it should be expected. But I did not expect the effect to be so noticeable.
Glossy produce clearly nicer image (sharper, colors are more vivid), but reflections can make it very impractical (especially during the day). Ideally I would choose matte but with higher resolution than Full HD.
Glossy/matte is also not a binary choice, as I understand there are displays with various degrees of glosiness/matte which might provide better trade off.
Agreed, I came to the same conclusion. Both my PC laptop and MacBook Air have glossy displays but MacBook one reflects back less light which makes it easier to work with.
1440p is the sweetspot for laptop displays for me. 4k seems like unnecessary pixel density, probably makes sense if you're doing creative work. The jump from 1080p to 1440p definitely gives me a productivity upgrade though.
You can install Pop!_OS on your machine if you wish to keep the HiDPI screen. I have used it on my XPS 15 for years and it works flawlessly, even with the nVidia GPU!
It works for me; I can definitely tell the difference in smoothness vs the MacBook I abandoned in favor of System76, but >90% of the time I use it docked to a big 4K monitor and when I'm untethered I value the extra battery life over the extra pixels. If I had to use the laptop screen as my daily driver it probably wouldn't work for me, though.
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.
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)
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.
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.
I daily drive a 4k monitor with pop and have no problems. I do disable fractional scaling for the few programs that seem to have an issue with it (otherwise 125% would be my default). I'm typically at 100% though.
Steam and a handful of games have been the only issues. Otherwise it looks better than windows.
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.
> 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?
I also want my software to "just work" - and in that sense I like Windows. But I don't like the telemetry and anti-user practices and that's enough for me to use Linux. I've never tried PopOS though, but after this post I might.
Personally, I don't want to be part of Microsoft's ecosystem anymore, but I want some 'convenience' because I actually need to be productive rather than forever navigating the maze of compatible driver versions, so there are a number Linux flavours that fit this middle ground quite nicely.
I use Pop_OS in preference to Ubuntu, but Ubuntu for the most convenience short of anything Microsoft.
I've set up Arch before and it's not fun to me. I don't want to change and write dozens of config files to get up and running. Some people find that sort of thing fun. I don't. Does that mean I'm conceding some control over my operating system to the developers of the distribution I'm using? Of course. And it's something I willingly do because it's not an interesting problem for me to solve and I frankly don't care that much. If there were something nefarious going on, I might care, but it's simply not possible for me to live my life auditing every bit of software that's running on my system.
I suspect most people, even those that are heavily invested in FOSS have some limit to that as well. I doubt that many people are auditing the code for every application or program they compile on their computer. They have a sphere of trust where they can just assume that what they're running is safe enough and that the software isn't going out of its way to be malicious. It's a matter of degrees. I happen to be okay with giving up some control for the convenience of not having to try to install wifi drivers on my computer without access to the internet.
I don't think it's self-contradictory at all. People have different ideas of what an Operating System should be and that's reflected in the number of different linux distributions all with their own ideas and philosophies. I just happen to really like what System76 has done.
When does linux not "just works"? I have been running linux on my thinkpads (x200, x220, w540, T470, T480s) etc and "it just works", with appreciably much less fiddling around than I would on a similar windows desktop with drivers etc. (My last install of linuxmint on my T480s I think I spent more time fiddling with vimrc than the actual OS).
And I dare say that on servers, linux certainly "just works".
The answer to this is "For almost its entire history of being used as a desktop operating system by users without a significantly above average level of technical knowledge."
I think Linux is in a pretty good state for at least the last few years but you have to be either unreasonably lucky or simply joking to be able to pretend you are unfamiliar with the concept of running into various hardware/driver/software issues attempting to run Linux as a desktop OS. Even if you stick to "Linux Certified" hardware like Thinkpads.
Linux is my OS of choice these days, but over the years I've had 10x as many issues as I have with my Windows systems and I probably have 10x as much time in raw hours using Windows.
I think perhaps something happens to those of us with experience and expertise is when we run into an issue we might know how to fix it in 30 seconds or a few minutes so it doesn't even seem like it was an issue to us, simply part of configuring the system. However, when it happens to someone that's not experienced that same "non-issue" might result in them spending 4 hours on forums and various websites trying to figure out how to do something that would only take a few seconds if they already knew how.
That's assuming they don't just throw their hands up immediately and ask someone to fix it for them.
1. Hibernation is broken in three different ways (1. it's disabled by default 2. it resumes instantly when certain hardware is plugged in 3. it only works if almost no programs run, probably because the default swap partition is too small)
2. Computer freezes when running out of memory. Still not sure how to improve this, perhaps a bigger swap partition, perhaps changing the OOM killer configuration or installing another OOM killer daemon.
3. Ran out of space on the boot partition so kernel updates won't work until I figure out how to manually fix that. Plus the last kernel it installed before complaining doesn't boot at all, so I have to manually pick an old one.
And my earlier attempts on other distributions didn't go better either. Fedora managed to corrupt its package manager state and started complaining about incorrectly signed packages. And on Ubuntu I didn't manage to switch to nvidia's driver, it kept using nouveau with no indication of what's wrong.
Personally I switched to Linux not because it was open source but because it is better. I also believe the open source philosophy is beneficial users and developers but it wasn't the primary reason.
There are currently many "working out of the box" distros available. Mint, Solus, Manjaro, Ubuntu, KDE Neon, Fedora, MX, Elementary etc. to name a few.
Linux as an ecosystem is a lot further along that many people seem to either realise or give credit for.
It most certainly works out of the box for most general tasks.
Of course there are still limitations like a lack of some software (Photoshop...) and peripherals support, but these are becoming far more uncommon. I even find with Steam's proton implementation I can install and run most Windows games without a second thought.
You mean for devs to support Linux? That is indeed an issue of some concern, because most Linux users would prefer native Linux games. But, if you mean "bother installing Linux", then get ready for the whole privacy and control discussion :)
OS/2 proved what happens when that route is followed.
As for privacy and control discussion, when most GNU/Linux users happen to mostly consume Electron and Web Apps, install applications via curl | sudo sh, there is hardly anything to discuss, other than cargo cult of a false sense of privacy and control.
Same applies to certain Linux distributions, like Android and ChromeOS, or are they Linux for promoting desktop and non-Linux for when it isn't convenient?
There are many supported and distinct Linux distributions, not so for Windows versions. I wouldn't want to run Windows 2000 in 2021 because it's the last one without telemetry.
How does that even follow? You'd say the same if Linux couldn't run Windows games.
Also, you used "begs the question" incorrectly. You mean "raises the question".
Also, because Windows is a steaming pile of donkey turd that shoves ads in your OS, reboots when you're trying to get work done, resets privacy and power management settings after many of its coerced updates, and has a spazzy and inconsistent UI that offers limited customization. Also closed source.
Because it's free for one. Second because I have so many more options and control of what my OS is.
But really, reality is that Linux support for games is still caught in the cycle of too few customers to bother -> customers want better Linux support before moving over -> too few customers to bother...
So I can now have all the (my) benefits of Linux and enjoy gaming that otherwise I wouldn't.
Manjaro is currently what I'm settled on. It manages different kernel versions and graphics drivers really well, much better than Ubuntu. And the package manager is much easier to use (It's easy to create your own packages from PKGBUILDs) The XFCE version is incredibly solid, and with a few tweaks you can even get i3 to work alongside it!
My recent experience with Manjaro has been extremely good as well, so that although I'm still using Debian for tinkering, I now put Manjaro on all other new Linux users PCs.
That sounds funny to me, using arch for daily driving and Debian for tinkering xD
Not saying you’re wrong, I just found it amusing and slightly ironic.
I get your point:)
Many among the users I introduced to Linux are elderly with no or little computer experience, and others just need it for the usual web+office+media applications, so having a very consistent desktop where everything works out of the box as in Manjaro beats the incredible number of packages available on Debian.
This is about XFCE of course, which is what I install: close enough to Windows to be useable by all, simple enough not to balk at the first inconsistence, fast enough to run pretty much everywhere. Gnome, Mate and KDE would probably be fantastic on all Distros, but XFCE on Debian defaults to ugly and unnecessary settings (a DM ideal for small screen laptops which defaults to two panels?).
I don't have experience with plain Arch, but having read only good things about it will probably try it soon.
Debian has been really good for just about everything since I moved to it many moons ago, and as of today is still my daily driver on all machines, but sometimes requires constant fiddling here and there, and I'm getting old; I stopped recompiling my kernels on PCs over 10 years ago, and a system that works just out of the box is too temping:) Not to criticize Debian, which has been great almost everywhere, but it gave some problems with some niche applications, for example music: a working LinVST installation is not easy to obtain, and it is tightly tied with the running kernel, which if has _rt extensions will help with low latency but sometimes doesn't let one compile with standard Wine libraries, and when one finds a good compromise, bang! VirtualBox stops working because now its kernel module doesn't build anymore. Grrrr!:) So I may take the chance to test some other options, and Arch might be a good candidate.
As an occasional Linux user, I still get annoyed with situations like "GNOME people decided that you shouldn't want to put files on the desktop" which then spills over into supposedly user friendly distros. So it's not all sunshine and roses even when it's officially working-as-intended.
Lately I've been using Mint-XFCE in a VM for some of my Linux needs and that's been much better performing than trying to virtualize the fancier desktop environments. But Pop_OS looks promising for next time I need a native linux environment.
What's this about GNOME and files on the desktop? I have file on my GNOME desktop. Sometimes the ordering of them is a little weird, but I've never had an issue with it.
For the average non-technical user going through the trouble of installing an extension to put files on the desktop is a non-starter. If I switched my parents to Linux with GNOME they would be completely lost being unable to put files on the desktop. If people want Linux to be the next great desktop OS then things like this are a huge barrier to usability.
It might be trivial, but it's something that can annoy new Linux users.
And they also break on every GNOME release, often enough that I kinda' gave up on my favorite GNOME extension (Dash to Dock). Not that I blame the extension developers, but e.g. the review times on extensions.gnome.org are atrocious, and the build system is fiddly enough that I can't remember what I did to install it manually 6, 12 or 18 months earlier.
From the link pjmlp posted [0], to install extensions in Gnome 40 you need to install a 3rd party browser extension (not available through Firefox add-on store) and then from your package manager install the browser-shell-connector. These will let you enable and disable extensions, but you still can't configure them.
To configure your newly enabled extensions, you need to install the Gnome Extensions flatpack.
And to do that, you're off to the command line to add Flathub as a remote repo.
I don't know that the desktop icons extension requires any configuration, but based on the fact that you need an extension for it I'm guessing that there are similarly weird decisions being made elsewhere, and being able to change extension settings is going to be useful. And to get to that point you have a four stage install including a trip to the command line?
Why not ship Gnome Extensions by default with the OS? Is this like Steve Jobs with his "you're holding it wrong" remark, and people who want to put icons on the desktop are supposed to just stop wanting to do that?
I suppose so. On my distro (Arch, BTW) I need the browser extension, and I can use the non-Flatpak GNOME Extensions just fine (used to be Tweaks before).
I think the GNOME developers want to stop hearing about packaging issues for their apps, so they ask everyone to use the Flatpak versions. I have nothing against it, but there's no point as long as the distro-provided version still works.
GNOME Shell integration extension is available on the add-on stores of both Firefox[0] and Chrome[1]. Their preferences are available either from the installed page or the `gnome-extensions` CLI tool included with GNOME Shell or the Extensions app you're talking about.
There are lots which allow you to install proprietary drivers and or codecs at install time. Or give you the choice to enable non-free repos. Not everyone cares about free vs libre. Some people want ‘obvious’ things to just work out of the box as they would on other OSes.
But of the ones above you mention that I’ve used in anger you’re absolutely right and that’s the very idea of them. To ‘just work’.
I prefer Tumbleweed though. Well tested rolling release (https://openbuildservice.org/), snapshots on update.
With the opi package you can install: chrome, codecs, dotnet, msedge, msteams, plex, skype, signal, slack, teamviewer, vivaldi, vscode, vscodium, zoom and more.
Brave is app i am missing so far, but having the newest version KDE and other software that required a PPA on Ubuntu is pretty nice.
And it feels much snappier installed on a SATA SSD than Mint from a NVME SSD on the same machine!
Also note that you can install the automatic tiling extension in other GNOME-based distros, you necessarily don't need PopOS to use it (though I had some weird bugs with it in Manjaro, it's probably going to be more unstable than PopOS's integration)
Hopefully the GNOME folks will add some of this tiling support as part of their upstream release. Extensions can be problematic and introduce a lot of random breakage.
I’ve been running it with a Radeon GPU and a beefy Intel desktop professor. It’s a real joy. I can play so many nice computer games via Steam. Pop_OS is a joy to use. It’s not a lot different from Ubuntu, but it’s quite reliable and fits my work style these days quite well. Can’t complain at all. This is the longest I have been pure Linux in a long time. It’s hard to believe I have been using Linux for over 20 years.
>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.
This is really quite disingenuous, especially coupled with the jab at Nvidia cards. In case you weren't aware, there is no option to actually make an Nvidia card useful because of their locking up of P-state modifications and re-clocking behind cryptographically signed firmware they refuse to distribute. I think you actually know this though, otherwise why would you bring up the crippled nature of Nvidia cards of post-Maxwell and later?
PopOS definitely deserves accolades, but let's not pass off Nvidia's giving the middle finger proctological exam to the FOSS community as a point that makes PopOS better. Nothing is made better by that but Nvidia's bottom line, and vendor lock-in agenda.
I have heard this criticism of Nvidia w.r.t. Linux before, so I feel like I must be missing something. Working with Nvidia cards has been easy for the last ~5 years -- literally just install their drivers, `apt install nvidia-cuda-toolkit` and CuDNN and everything just works. In comparison, I've never been able to figure out how to get Tensorflow or PyTorch to run on Windows. What are your use cases that the Nvidia drivers fail for?
EDIT: I think I misunderstood, and your complaint wasn't about the quality of their proprietary drivers, rather their refusal to work with open source developers. I was reacting mainly to "no option to actually make an Nvidia card useful"
I can’t get cuda to work for me on my nvidia 1660x. I’ve followed their steps straight from nvidia, am using the Ubuntu LTS, etc. I’m sure I must be doing something wrong but I always get a dependency issue (cuda depends on X which isn’t going to be installed) or when I try to import tensorflow it claims it can’t find the .so files. I’ve added the cuda path in opt to the LD path with no luck. I bought nvidia specifically to be able to use tensorflow (had an amd prior) and I’m just kinda upset about it.
I also had to resort to looking at guides on Medium.com for installing CUDA, as the install is not as straightforward as it looks. Alternatively, you can search on DuckDuckGo (for privacy reasons) with this as the query: "NVIDIA" AND "CUDA" AND "install" site:medium.com
Installing CUDA (with kernel driver, CuDNN, Tensorflow/PyTorch) has not been easy for me either. Usually you want to have the latest version of all of them. But sometimes the very latest version of these packages is not yet supported by the other. This is where it get difficult. Also the fact that the CUDA instruction from TensorFlow [1] still are at Ubuntu 18.04 does not help.
In my experience installing PyTorch with CUDA is easier than TensorFlow (and much better documented).
The best experience, in my opinion, is however with CUDA and Flux.jl or Knet.jl on Julia. All you need there is the kernel driver (and julia). CUDA and CuDNN will be installed per default if necessary. I am wondering why CUDA is not simply a pip-installable package (like it is in Julia or in Conda).
It’s not a jab against FOSS and I apologize if it comes off that way. Nvidia is absolutely the problematic party here.
In the end though I’m not going to use nouveau and am one hundred percent going to install the proprietary blobs Nvidia provides because I bought a dedicated GPU for a reason. Making it so I don’t have to jump through hoops to do that is appreciated and PopOS is one of the few that will just let me skip several steps to get there.
I've been using Linux with NVidia since ... wow, what time the 9600 was around again? I've been with many new generations and I am currently using a 3090 and I can't remember ever having a problem. The performance is almost the same (depends on the use-case, sometimes better, sometimes worse) as on Windows, at least when using things like Tensorflow and the like. The only problems I ever had were when I tried to get a few ATI/AMD cards to run on someone else's computer. But hey, at least people praise them for being cool with the FOSS community I guess?
I know Ubuntu works with the nvidia-* drivers but does it detect and select them for use by default or does it use nouveau until a (knowledgable) user reconfigures which driver is in use? And with legacy nvidia such as 340 there isn’t Wayland support and so enabling by default could lead to a broken system.
Same with a kernel greater >= 5.10 and that particular driver series. So would be nice to hear what Pop OS is doing here that Ubuntu isn’t.
If the rumours of nvidia open sourcing their drivers are true (sorry no link - just something I heard) they’ll all work out of the box one day (hopefully !).
If, during the Ubuntu install process, you check the box to install proprietary drivers, it will automatically detect & install the nvidia-* drivers. You can also do this from the settings post-install. No Linux knowledge required really, it’s easier than the state of things on Windows.
None of the solutions for switching between discrete and integrated graphics cards on Linux are particularly great (compared to Windows where it just works automagically). Pop OS at the very least has some nice UI to switch modes, and doesn’t default to Nouveau etc. Nothing you can’t achieve elsewhere but nice that they’re thought about it.
Funny, I tried to switch to PopOS a few months ago and my Ethernet card would just not work. I switched over to tether from my phone but after installing a few drivers and it not working I switched back to Ubuntu which just works with my Ethernet card (though I have to install a different driver to get gigabit speeds.) Really not sure what the issue was but I didn’t feel like doing a deep dive when every distro I’ve used in the past decade has had no problems with Ethernet cards on first boot.
Pop_OS is downstream of Ubuntu, so it would be especially odd for a regression to occur on something as low level as support for a specific Ethernet card. Which Ethernet card is it, specifically?
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
Sorry to hear that! I had a similar issue happen to me where my Lemur Pro wouldn't boot after doing a series of upgrades — including a kernel update.
After hours of panic in Recovery mode and approaching a re-image, the fix was simply pinning the kernel to 5.8 instead of 5.11 and using kernelstub to use 5.8.
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.
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.
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.
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.
rfkill is potentially coming from laptop_mode, it's a power saving thing. Annoying as all hell.
Surprised Lenovo get it so wrong here when ThinkPads have always worked pretty well.
>This is definitely not a new hardware nor it has some strange spec
I don't think this statement applies at all for laptops. The things in the laptop that are randomly crap to work with aren't gonna be CPU or GPU, they're gonna be brightness controllers, fan controllers, extra buttons...
There's a known bug in Debian-derived distributions where the kernel-loaded drivers and modules are not set up to handle backlight changes on some hardware. IIRC, it's something to do with PWM drivers not being loaded correctly in early boot. Try Fedora or CentOS instead, if that works without issue you might well be hitting that bug.
"Use a different distro" is the Linux Desktop's go-to troubleshooting step for, apparently, any and all problems. Nevermind that even if a different distro does solve one of your issues it undoubtedly introduces several of its own.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadAfter 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Full HD matte seems quite unsharp compared to the Full HD (or 4K) glossy. But with my eyes, I don't really see the difference between Full HD glossy and 4K glossy.
Matte screen by its nature desharpens so it should be expected. But I did not expect the effect to be so noticeable.
Glossy/matte is also not a binary choice, as I understand there are displays with various degrees of glosiness/matte which might provide better trade off.
Are you talking about their laptops?
https://twitter.com/system76/status/1313573512792215558
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.
Steam and a handful of games have been the only issues. Otherwise it looks better than windows.
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.
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?
I think the OP meant in terms of if you don't want the same non OSS binaries nVidia ships you can install something else?
Personally, I don't want to be part of Microsoft's ecosystem anymore, but I want some 'convenience' because I actually need to be productive rather than forever navigating the maze of compatible driver versions, so there are a number Linux flavours that fit this middle ground quite nicely.
I use Pop_OS in preference to Ubuntu, but Ubuntu for the most convenience short of anything Microsoft.
I suspect most people, even those that are heavily invested in FOSS have some limit to that as well. I doubt that many people are auditing the code for every application or program they compile on their computer. They have a sphere of trust where they can just assume that what they're running is safe enough and that the software isn't going out of its way to be malicious. It's a matter of degrees. I happen to be okay with giving up some control for the convenience of not having to try to install wifi drivers on my computer without access to the internet.
I don't think it's self-contradictory at all. People have different ideas of what an Operating System should be and that's reflected in the number of different linux distributions all with their own ideas and philosophies. I just happen to really like what System76 has done.
And I dare say that on servers, linux certainly "just works".
The answer to this is "For almost its entire history of being used as a desktop operating system by users without a significantly above average level of technical knowledge."
I think Linux is in a pretty good state for at least the last few years but you have to be either unreasonably lucky or simply joking to be able to pretend you are unfamiliar with the concept of running into various hardware/driver/software issues attempting to run Linux as a desktop OS. Even if you stick to "Linux Certified" hardware like Thinkpads.
Linux is my OS of choice these days, but over the years I've had 10x as many issues as I have with my Windows systems and I probably have 10x as much time in raw hours using Windows.
I think perhaps something happens to those of us with experience and expertise is when we run into an issue we might know how to fix it in 30 seconds or a few minutes so it doesn't even seem like it was an issue to us, simply part of configuring the system. However, when it happens to someone that's not experienced that same "non-issue" might result in them spending 4 hours on forums and various websites trying to figure out how to do something that would only take a few seconds if they already knew how.
That's assuming they don't just throw their hands up immediately and ask someone to fix it for them.
1. Hibernation is broken in three different ways (1. it's disabled by default 2. it resumes instantly when certain hardware is plugged in 3. it only works if almost no programs run, probably because the default swap partition is too small)
2. Computer freezes when running out of memory. Still not sure how to improve this, perhaps a bigger swap partition, perhaps changing the OOM killer configuration or installing another OOM killer daemon.
3. Ran out of space on the boot partition so kernel updates won't work until I figure out how to manually fix that. Plus the last kernel it installed before complaining doesn't boot at all, so I have to manually pick an old one.
And my earlier attempts on other distributions didn't go better either. Fedora managed to corrupt its package manager state and started complaining about incorrectly signed packages. And on Ubuntu I didn't manage to switch to nvidia's driver, it kept using nouveau with no indication of what's wrong.
It most certainly works out of the box for most general tasks.
Of course there are still limitations like a lack of some software (Photoshop...) and peripherals support, but these are becoming far more uncommon. I even find with Steam's proton implementation I can install and run most Windows games without a second thought.
Which begs the question why bother with Linux then.
As for privacy and control discussion, when most GNU/Linux users happen to mostly consume Electron and Web Apps, install applications via curl | sudo sh, there is hardly anything to discuss, other than cargo cult of a false sense of privacy and control.
Pity that all that security goes away the second an Electron app or Chrome is made use of.
You're making silly arguments based on your own strawmen.
Also, you used "begs the question" incorrectly. You mean "raises the question".
Also, because Windows is a steaming pile of donkey turd that shoves ads in your OS, reboots when you're trying to get work done, resets privacy and power management settings after many of its coerced updates, and has a spazzy and inconsistent UI that offers limited customization. Also closed source.
But really, reality is that Linux support for games is still caught in the cycle of too few customers to bother -> customers want better Linux support before moving over -> too few customers to bother...
So I can now have all the (my) benefits of Linux and enjoy gaming that otherwise I wouldn't.
Debian has been really good for just about everything since I moved to it many moons ago, and as of today is still my daily driver on all machines, but sometimes requires constant fiddling here and there, and I'm getting old; I stopped recompiling my kernels on PCs over 10 years ago, and a system that works just out of the box is too temping:) Not to criticize Debian, which has been great almost everywhere, but it gave some problems with some niche applications, for example music: a working LinVST installation is not easy to obtain, and it is tightly tied with the running kernel, which if has _rt extensions will help with low latency but sometimes doesn't let one compile with standard Wine libraries, and when one finds a good compromise, bang! VirtualBox stops working because now its kernel module doesn't build anymore. Grrrr!:) So I may take the chance to test some other options, and Arch might be a good candidate.
Lately I've been using Mint-XFCE in a VM for some of my Linux needs and that's been much better performing than trying to virtualize the fancier desktop environments. But Pop_OS looks promising for next time I need a native linux environment.
And they also break on every GNOME release, often enough that I kinda' gave up on my favorite GNOME extension (Dash to Dock). Not that I blame the extension developers, but e.g. the review times on extensions.gnome.org are atrocious, and the build system is fiddly enough that I can't remember what I did to install it manually 6, 12 or 18 months earlier.
To configure your newly enabled extensions, you need to install the Gnome Extensions flatpack.
And to do that, you're off to the command line to add Flathub as a remote repo.
I don't know that the desktop icons extension requires any configuration, but based on the fact that you need an extension for it I'm guessing that there are similarly weird decisions being made elsewhere, and being able to change extension settings is going to be useful. And to get to that point you have a four stage install including a trip to the command line?
Why not ship Gnome Extensions by default with the OS? Is this like Steve Jobs with his "you're holding it wrong" remark, and people who want to put icons on the desktop are supposed to just stop wanting to do that?
[0]: https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gnome-40.html
I think the GNOME developers want to stop hearing about packaging issues for their apps, so they ask everyone to use the Flatpak versions. I have nothing against it, but there's no point as long as the distro-provided version still works.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/gnome-shell-inte...
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gnome-shell-integr...
> You MUST install native connector for this extension to work.
https://itsfoss.com/add-files-on-desktop-ubuntu/
https://markperez.dev/blog/organize-desktop-icons-ubuntu/
But of the ones above you mention that I’ve used in anger you’re absolutely right and that’s the very idea of them. To ‘just work’.
I prefer Tumbleweed though. Well tested rolling release (https://openbuildservice.org/), snapshots on update. With the opi package you can install: chrome, codecs, dotnet, msedge, msteams, plex, skype, signal, slack, teamviewer, vivaldi, vscode, vscodium, zoom and more. Brave is app i am missing so far, but having the newest version KDE and other software that required a PPA on Ubuntu is pretty nice.
And it feels much snappier installed on a SATA SSD than Mint from a NVME SSD on the same machine!
[edit: more info]
https://github.com/pop-os/shell
This is really quite disingenuous, especially coupled with the jab at Nvidia cards. In case you weren't aware, there is no option to actually make an Nvidia card useful because of their locking up of P-state modifications and re-clocking behind cryptographically signed firmware they refuse to distribute. I think you actually know this though, otherwise why would you bring up the crippled nature of Nvidia cards of post-Maxwell and later?
PopOS definitely deserves accolades, but let's not pass off Nvidia's giving the middle finger proctological exam to the FOSS community as a point that makes PopOS better. Nothing is made better by that but Nvidia's bottom line, and vendor lock-in agenda.
EDIT: I think I misunderstood, and your complaint wasn't about the quality of their proprietary drivers, rather their refusal to work with open source developers. I was reacting mainly to "no option to actually make an Nvidia card useful"
I also had to resort to looking at guides on Medium.com for installing CUDA, as the install is not as straightforward as it looks. Alternatively, you can search on DuckDuckGo (for privacy reasons) with this as the query: "NVIDIA" AND "CUDA" AND "install" site:medium.com
[1] https://www.tensorflow.org/install/gpu
In the end though I’m not going to use nouveau and am one hundred percent going to install the proprietary blobs Nvidia provides because I bought a dedicated GPU for a reason. Making it so I don’t have to jump through hoops to do that is appreciated and PopOS is one of the few that will just let me skip several steps to get there.
Same with a kernel greater >= 5.10 and that particular driver series. So would be nice to hear what Pop OS is doing here that Ubuntu isn’t.
If the rumours of nvidia open sourcing their drivers are true (sorry no link - just something I heard) they’ll all work out of the box one day (hopefully !).
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
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.
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.
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.
At least distros like NixOS have fundamentally different architectures.
Edit: also JunOS, the other ios, WatchOS...
Either way, it's 2 months late and 4 months until October's release, so not really ridiculous or anything.
After hours of panic in Recovery mode and approaching a re-image, the fix was simply pinning the kernel to 5.8 instead of 5.11 and using kernelstub to use 5.8.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No issues whatsoever. Even this random cheap bluetooth dongle I use works without a hassle.
Surprised Lenovo get it so wrong here when ThinkPads have always worked pretty well.
>This is definitely not a new hardware nor it has some strange spec
I don't think this statement applies at all for laptops. The things in the laptop that are randomly crap to work with aren't gonna be CPU or GPU, they're gonna be brightness controllers, fan controllers, extra buttons...
This is not what a competent platform looks like.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
Perception of the distro's overall quality would reach the moon.
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.
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