[ META ] What is the community's opinion of Pop!_OS?

It’s an Ubuntu downstream maintained by Linux box maker System76 which is targeted for both general usability and design/media applications. They will soon be debuting their own home-spun desktop environment, Cosmic DE, which is highly anticipated by the Linux community.

How does the community here feel about this distribution and the company that has brought it to us? How do you feel about the projects that they’re working on, and their goals for the distribution moving forward?

joojmachine,

It used to be one of if not the greatest entry point for new Linux users, nowadays they got too worked up on their beef with GNOME, are trying to do their own thing and it honestly looks kinda pathetic.

mmstick, (edited )
@mmstick@lemmy.world avatar

If COSMIC is pathetic, then GNOME must be abysmally unusable. COSMIC was already planned long before there was any beef with GNOME. We listen to user feedback and prioritize development of features that our developers and users want. Good luck trying to replicate COSMIC’s theming and tiling capabilities in GNOME. Let alone the overall stability and performance of COSMIC. COSMIC Store is the fastest app store on Linux now. I’d recommend everyone to try it out. sudo apt install cosmic-store

joojmachine, (edited )

My comment did sound way more aggressive than I intended, and I apologize for that, but getting this defensive as an answer when the question asked for an opinion definitely isn’t any less pathetic. I have a lot of respect on the work of the Pop team, and Pop was the first distro I have used, but none of your points are… good?

  • Gradience fills the need for theming in an individual level for those that want it without breaking the look and feel of apps without the developers’ intent at a distribution level;
  • Forge replicates most of Pop’s tiling capabilities, picking up the great work your team did over the years without intending to drop it for your own thing;
  • Performance is something that isn’t necessarily lacking in other DEs and stable is a bold statement for a product still in alpha. Hopefully it really is whenever it gets a stable release though, I’m not rooting against your work;
  • Also, it isn’t hard to say your app store is the fastest when it doesn’t have the years of crust other ones gathered from all the work put into it. I would get worried if it wasn’t.
mmstick, (edited )
@mmstick@lemmy.world avatar

Speaking of being defensive, not only are you being far more defensive than I, but these bullet points are both misleading and wildly inaccurate. It’s also telling that you think none of my points are good, when they are the truth. Could you possibly be even more a hypocrite?

joojmachine,

If they are so misleading and inaccurate, then I’m all ears to why.

Again, I’m not against the project or the team, I just don’t like the direction S76 went for their own thing, instead of improving other existing projects. Having a full Rust stack is potentially pretty great though, and I’m all in for what it might become in the future, but this attitude about even the slightest of criticism speaks volumes about the people working on it.

governorkeagan,

I used Pop!_OS when transitioning from Windows 11 to Linux and ran it for about 3/4 months before deciding to try EndeavourOS. I had absolutely no issues with Pop and it really made the transition super easy.

I’m super excited to try out their new (cosmic) DE! I will probably install Pop on my 2nd SSD to test and play around with it.

lal309,

I’ve been thinking about running EndeavorOS but seeing people here complain about Arch breaking when the AUR is used, makes me shy away from EOS. Do you use packages from AUR and have you had any issues with the OS? Running Tumbleweed right now.

governorkeagan,

Any problems I’ve had have been my own doing or a weird Nvidia driver issue. Having said that though, I’ve had very very few issues, it has been rock solid!

I’ve got a couple of packages from the AUR but I don’t recall ever having any issues with any of them.


The only real “issue” I’ve had has been related to the Linux Kernel on my main machine (Ryzen 5 3600 & Nvidia GTX1660 TI). For some reason, only the LTS and mainline kernel work, if I try any other kernel I get an error (something to do with Nvidia and my GPU).

lal309,

Awesome! Thanks for the reply. Next time my machine needs to be wiped, I’m heading towards EOS to give it a try.

governorkeagan,

So…I’ve just updated my laptop with EOS and now my /efi partition won’t mount. Things definitely can break…unfortunately

lal309,

Uh oh. How did the partition get deleted from your fstab?

governorkeagan,

It all started with a bad update that led to a kernel mismatch. I then attempted to fix the issue and made it worse…it was a little too much for my skill level (I was reading forum posts with similar issues when trying to fix it.)

starman,
@starman@programming.dev avatar

I really appreciate that they’re working on new desktop environment. I’ll probably switch from Hyprland to Cosmic once it’s available on NixOS

mmstick,
@mmstick@lemmy.world avatar

I think it already it is available on NixOS

starman,
@starman@programming.dev avatar

Yeah, but sort of unofficially… I wait for this: github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/259641

CrabAndBroom,

I like it, I think it’s a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu is these days, if you know what I mean. And I’m really interested to see how the COSMIC desktop environment works out.

Also I really like their laptops. I want to get a Pangolin one day lol.

Octorine,

Ive been using it for several years. I hardly think about it at all, which is pretty high praise.

overload,

Is good, I got bored though as they haven’t released a major update since 2022. On opensuse tumbleweed now.

Not having the bugs of using gnome extensions for customisations is nice.

BaldProphet,
@BaldProphet@kbin.social avatar

For some reason, referring to a computer or VM that runs Linux as a "Linux box" triggers me.

stargazingpenguin,

I like it! It was the first distro I used when I started using Linux full time. It just works most of the time, (other than the Pop Shop) and fixes most of the issues I have with Gnome. I’m looking forward to seeing how Cosmic works once it is ready to go, and I’m hoping their new shop I just read about works well!

When I first started using it I wanted something that was far away from the Windows look, and it does it well. Maybe it’s weird, but having it look wildly different from Windows put me in a different mindset and helped me learn the Linux way of doing things rather than trying to make Linux work like Windows.

I’m still running it on my main gaming rig, but I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting on my other computers. I’ve gotten to really like both Budgie and Plasma since then, and I’m using distros with those DEs on them on two of my other computers.

mmstick, (edited )
@mmstick@lemmy.world avatar

Pop Shop

Install the cosmic-store (with cosmic-icons) and try it out!

stargazingpenguin,

I didn’t realize it could be installed already, I’ll give that a go. Thanks!

mmstick,
@mmstick@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, it’s in the Pop!_OS 22.04 repositories, this Fedora 40 COPR, and on the AUR.

Bizarroland,
@Bizarroland@kbin.social avatar

My problem with Pop OS is that on the two different machines I've installed it on it was very slow.

One of them made sense because it was an older mini Lenovo box, but the second machine I installed it on was a 10th gen Intel core i7 laptop with a Nvidia 2060 and 32 gigs of RAM and a decent one terabyte nvme SSD, and there would still be a massive pause with every click, somewhere between half a second and a second before anything would respond, and when updating or launching Firefox or anything it would always spin for a while and then pop up the sign saying this app is taking too long to respond.

Both of the devices were Lenovo devices, maybe there's some sort of fundamental incompatibility or missing driver or something but I couldn't cope with the lagginess of the OS.

Fedora worked swimmingly on both of them, for comparison.

possiblylinux127,

Pop Shop eats all resources. Try going to system monitor and killing it.

mmstick, (edited )
@mmstick@lemmy.world avatar

I’d just remove it with sudo apt remove pop-shop, and install cosmic-store (with cosmic-icons) instead.

mfat, (edited )

I never use “derivative” distros. I don’t want to run into weird problems and spend hours troubleshooting only to find out they have changed some config file.

gregorum,

What distro do you use, out of curiosity? System V?

J/k. What do you run?

mfat,

Fedora Workstation

LeFantome,

I cannot answer your question obviously but there are several “primary” distros.

Debian, Fedora, Arch, Void, Alpine, Chimera, RHEL, SUSE, Gentoo, and others are all built from scratch. You do not have to use SystemV. The closest to that is probably Slackware I guess.

PopOS is based on Ubuntu which is itself based on Debian.

gregorum,

i know. i was making a joke ;)

Father_Redbeard,
@Father_Redbeard@lemmy.ml avatar

I really like it. I tried several distros for my first dedicated desktop Linux machine and pop was the one that clicked. I like that it’s not trying to mimick windows UI, and only sorta behaves like macOS. Everyone else was too close to win10. Which I understand is a selling point, so to speak, but I’m so sick of windows that I wanted it to look and act differently.

crusa187,

I’m a pop_os enjoyer, the window manager is great especially on a small laptop screen. Also have it running in the living room on a media pc (streaming, light gaming, music etc) and it’s been fantastic for that application as well. Excited for the upcoming switch to cosmicDE, think that will be chef kiss for me.

Doods,

A semi-rolling distribution, with access to Ubuntu’s many PPA’s, and easily removable extensions that reveal the lovely vanilla Gnome experience, it’s great!

Also they are making a Rust desktop, which I am currently running, though not daily driving.

theshatterstone54,

How are you running COSMIC? I’m on Fedora.

Doods, (edited )

I am on Pop!_OS, I ran sudo apt install cosmic*.

Don’t worry, you’re not missing out on much, running video games, or any OpenGL thing including 2D games and GPU-accelerated terminal emulators is a bad experience, and alt+f4 isn’t implemented, and f11 to fullscreen is janky, and theming for buttons and such is clearly alpha.

The promise of an Arabic-supporting, Rust based, GPU-accelerated terminal is too attractive, however, as I was teared between multilingual terminal, Wezterm, Alacritty and Kitty for a while.

The first is horrible at everything but supporting languages, the second is really janky, the third doesn’t support tabs, the fourth has bad theming and customization.

umbrella,
@umbrella@lemmy.ml avatar

what are the benefits of a gpu-accelerated terminal?

mmstick,
@mmstick@lemmy.world avatar

Consumes less energy (CPU) while also rendering more responsively.

mmstick, (edited )
@mmstick@lemmy.world avatar

What GPU configuration do you have? I don’t have any of these issues. If NVIDIA, you have to wait for NVIDIA to release explicit sync Wayland drivers.

Doods, (edited )

Inaccurate report,

I just ran Neovim in terminal and was used to Neovide, so I thought it was choppy.

Intel HD 630.

There is, however, a 2D game - which I am not going to disclose the name of - that’s pretty broken. (It uses Adobe Flash as an engine)

Also the steam client doesn’t maximize properly with tiling but I am sure that’s reported.

I have been daily driving Cosmic for a week now; it caused me Arch-syndrome, everyday I run sudo apt update hoping to get some polish to the desktop.

Edit: there’s more…

Neovide’s transparency is completely broken, and shows a blank, though not a pitch black, color and screenshotting it results in seeing the text with a checkered background. (In the resulting screenshot only) (Running on Proton 8.0-5)

clipboard=unnamed plus, the setting supposed to unify Neovim’s clipboard and system’s, doesn’t work. clipboard: error : Error: target STRING not available

I also was unable to transfer a file to my phone using Cosmic Files, but Nemo worked, though I read that’s fixed in some Blog.

Edit II: I just discovered popdev:master it seems to be a general unstable branch instead of just Cosmic things, but I took the risk and added it, I just have to remember to remove it once 24.04’s released

mmstick,
@mmstick@lemmy.world avatar

What report are you referring to?

Doods,

running video games, or any OpenGL thing including 2D games and GPU-accelerated terminal emulators is a bad experience

The thing you replied to; I don’t open social media often enough to reply on time, so I sent you a late reply.

theshatterstone54, (edited )

You’re not missing out on much

Seems that you’re right. It’s almost usable currently, but it lacks some essential things for me, mainly some further snappiness and customisable key binds (old habits die hard and I’m not adapting my habits and workflow to new keybinds).

But after these get fixed, I can see myself potentially running COSMIC. This makes me even more excited for what the future will bring.

Edit: Also, sloppy focus aka focus-follows-mouse

And an option for static workspaces i.e a set number of workspaces that are constantly there, instead of dynamic workspaces that close with your windows and change your workflow because you closed the window on Workspace 4 so workspace 5 is now workspace 4 so when you go looking for the window on workspace 5, it’s not there.

Doods,

Also, sloppy focus aka focus-follows-mouse

It’s one of those features I always wanted to try, but always forget to look up how to actually enable and start using it, so I never actually tried it.

theshatterstone54,

Highly recommend trying it, especially on a tiling window manager! (doesn’t seem to be available for COSMIC yet, and I don’t think it’s in other DEs either, but I know floating WMs like Openbox had sloppy focus iirc.

Andromxda,
@Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

There’s a COPR repo ryanabx/cosmic-epoch

theshatterstone54,

And it works and seems to be regularly updated! Thanks for bringing this to my attention!

ADTJ,

I recently tried this for the first time for my grandad on an old dying laptop of his which was struggling to run at any speed.

During the install it had already messed with the hard drive partitions in order to run the live environment, which is a big no-no for me.

The whole point of the live environment is it shouldn’t change the system until you try to install!

It also meant I no longer had a free partition to install to anymore so I couldn’t even get through the installer since I also couldn’t resize etc. because the partition was in use.

Been using Debian/Ubuntu based Linux for about 20 years and never seen this issue until Pop! OS

gregorum,

During the install it had already messed with the hard drive partitions in order to run the live environment, which is a big no-no for me.

WHAA??‽!!

Ok, I’ve been dealing with this distribution for close to a decade and I’ve installed it on over a dozen machines of all sorts of configurations. I’ve never heard of this. I’m very curious as to hooooow this happened.

From all of my experience and everything I know, this absolutely should not have happened and could only be the result of some sort of mistake or bug or some usual circumstance. This is not the typical or normal experience.

possiblylinux127,

I once had a installer crash and wipe my drive in the process.

gregorum,

Like, as a bug, right? Not as SOP?

I mean, I get that - as a rare occurrence - shit can go wrong. I wouldn’t blame openSUSE (for example) if that happened during an install. I’d just assume it was a bug and that I was having a shitty day.

possiblylinux127,

It was some new distro that I forgot everything else about. It was very new so it problems were to be expected. I just didn’t expect it to write to disk.

gregorum,

I get where you’re coming from, it just blows my mind that you encountered this outrageously rare problem that must certainly have been a bug.

You must understand, this was not intended behavior, nor should this ever have happened. I’m very sorry for your experience.

possiblylinux127,

That was many years ago back when Linux was the new kid on the block

gregorum,

Popos has only been around for 6 1/2 years. Linux has been around since the 90s.

possiblylinux127,

It wasn’t Pop OS

gregorum,

Oh, sorry, I missed that, lol

ADTJ,

Yeah just tried it again now.

I deleted the partition again first, then when I got to the installer, it had created a new 50GB partition and mounted /var/crash and /var/log which can’t be unmounted (tried force unmount and all that jazz)

possiblylinux127,

It shouldn’t have touched anything

possiblylinux127,

Solid but occasionally buggy

COSMIC looks cool

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