[ 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?

spaphy,

I’ve had Linux pop OS on a USB and ran it for about a year and a half total before switching on and off to windows. I think it’s one of the few OSes that actually work on all my devices even obscure thinkpads. I’d still use it today however -

My issues with Linux as a whole stem from absolutely trash antivirus and auditing perspective. Windows suffers this in many ways but I think they’re a live service rather than a static service. I’ll give an example, we’re getting bitlocker encryption with backup support keys etc in case a user gets locked out of a device on all devices very soon in W11h24 I believe, as a default. Pop OS comes with disk encryption but if I forgot my password or what have you, or even want to make a USB encryption key to unlock the device if I forgot it, I’d be in trouble. There’s an element of user friendliness that OSX and Windows have, that Linux just doesn’t have. I get scared running these open source applications when we’re essentially in a Cold War and I need to depend on them for my business. Especially if the apps are developed in JavaScript there’s so many dependencies I can’t verify. I can use portmaster and some log trailing to sift it but something about it feels like I am still not secure.

gregorum,

I’m gonna venture to guess that your problems are not with your operating systems. Best of luck to you.

spaphy,

Lick my sack

YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU,

My only experience was on a shared machine (the $5,000 prebuilt offering) where one of the less tech literate people messed with nvidia drivers for data science. Worse, I was remote and it had some software from IT running.

Basically some combination of those things meant we ended up running it in recovery mode and all shared the same user. I think I downplay how shit that job was in my head.

The support from the company was ASS and I’m doubtful there was a human responding for the first few messages. I gave them very detailed logs of the issue, with links to their own documentation, and their response suggested they didn’t read past the first sentence. Really can’t imagine why I wouldn’t just stick to debian when the company support is worthless even after giving them 5k.

gregorum,

What year was this? Very rarely, I have heard bad experiences like this, but they were from a long time ago. From everything I’ve heard since (I’ve never had to contact their support, myself), their support - and their hardware - has massively improved.

Edit: I also have heard (unconfirmed) that they have a separate B2B unit now that has a separate support unit, too.

YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU,

About a year and a half ago. I am the anxious bug filling type as well, I make my questions very clear and provide all the info I anticipate they may need. That does not help when the info is not read. I had to copy and paste quite a bit from previous emails. This is while I was at a pretty significant institution as well.

gregorum,

Really? That recently? I’m really quite surprised. Especially at the low quality of customer support you received.

Of course, this should never have happened. A live install medium should never make alterations to an internal drive. I really just don’t know how that could’ve happened. Or why it happened. It must obviously have been a bug of some sort. My mind is boggled.

YIj54yALOJxEsY20eU,

I’m not the one who mentioned the instal medium but yeah I was pretty surprised as well. I’m sure I could’ve sorted things if I was on premise and could have IT reinstall their software.

possiblylinux127,

Solid but occasionally buggy

COSMIC looks cool

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

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!

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.

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.

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 ;)

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.

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.

BaldProphet,
@BaldProphet@kbin.social avatar

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

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.

Octorine,

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

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.

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

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