9 ms·

Pop OS – System76

203 points by robfig 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
elesbao 5y ago
[edit] Pop OS made my macbook air 2012 usable and it became a delight to hack on Rust even given the hw limitations. Their attention to detail on top of a distro that I already respect for that is awesome. Long live Pop OS.
graynk 5y ago
I've been using Pop OS as my daily driver for several years now on my desktop with Nvidia videocard. Never before have I experienced such a stable Linux distro.
encryptluks2 5y ago
This tiling feature looks just like i3 or Sway.. pretty sure it is using it under the hood. Not sure why they changed the default shortcuts though, nor why they want to rename everything under the Pop OS brand.. rather than just give credit to the real contributors.
- fish45 5y ago
  https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell You're wrong
  - encryptluks2 5y ago
    So a copycat implemented in JavaScript.
    - vimacs2 5y ago
      You sound like somebody who's sampled a grand total of 1 tiling wm and now thinks they know the field. You do not. By your reasoning, i3 is a copycat of ION or wmii and shouldn't have even bothered. There is plenty of room in the market for more tiling wm's. Yes, you can technically run i3 in conjunction with Gnome but then you are essentially losing all the QoL and floating features of Mutter including the expose view which I use heavily.
- nitinreddy88 5y ago
  Its neither i3 nor Sway. Its their own implementation on top of GNOME. i3, sway are too complicated for first time users and requires lot of configuration and tweaks. Personally I found Pop Shell is the best thing that can get anyone started with simple toggle on/off, customisation of shortcuts and available out of the box. https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- d_tr 5y ago
  It's written in TypeScript...
- hakube 5y ago
  It's using GNOME extensions. GNOME has it's own window manager called Mutter. You should Google stuff first before leaving comments like this
- nsonha 5y ago
  Don't all tilling VMs look alike (they have no look)? This is much more mouse friendly than i3 default.
- anaganisk 5y ago
  May be you should check your case before making accusations? You can you be so sure yet so wrong.
perihelions 5y ago
If you're interested in the tiling features of Pop OS, they're also available as a standalone extension for GNOME Shell. Very little friction to test them out (if you're already running GNOME). https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-shell/ https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-shell/
- nsonha 5y ago
  I just want to open all windows floating and being able to manually snap windows in to a 3 columns grid, can this do it?
  - FieryTransition 5y ago
    Try a gnome extension called gtile
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - nsonha 5y ago
      It's not keyboard-driven, that's a bummer. In the past, I used an extension called Put Windows that was perfect for my need, but that stopped working on Gnome 40.
      - d_tr 5y ago
        I used Gnome for a while and I just made my own very simple extension then, which was just a bunch of keybindings to move and resize the focused window. Super for a 2x2 grid or Super + Shift for a 3x2 grid, plus a Numpad key to place the window on the grid. I guess it would still work with 40 because of how simple it was, but even if not, it would most probably be trivial to update, so you might want to consider this route.
  - rablackburn 5y ago
    Nope, I want the same thing and just turned off the tiling desktop feature because it was easier to manually juggle them.
amatecha 5y ago
This is funny, I am literally in the middle of writing an ISO of this OS to a USB stick to try installing on my laptop. I've been trying to find a good linux distro for a "2-in-1" laptop that has a stylus (Surface, Yoga, etc.)... Pop!_OS came up as a strong contender in discussions/posts I could find online. Guess I'll find out shortly! :)
- askvictor 5y ago
  Same, am currently re-partitioning to install Pop (via Ventoy USB as was posted yesterday).
- amatecha 5y ago
  Just to update, I was impressed with Pop!_OS on my "2-in-1". Turned on virtual keyboard under Accessibility settings, and got to drawing in Krita. I bound one of the buttons on the front of the screen to "undo" in Krita. Works quite well, though there are some issues I'll have to figure out, but so far Pop!_OS was the best by far of the ones I've tried. I was able to use all kinds of applications without issue. Going to install this as the long-term OS once I get an SSD to drop in this machine! Woot :)
Shared404 5y ago
As far as I'm concerned, this is the current gold standard for out-of-box experience desktop Linux. There are things I would do differently if I were building a system myself, but PopOS "Just Works", and is more polished than Win10 imho.
- toastercat 5y ago
  Installed it on a Dell XPS13 recently. It's great except I have to restart GNOME every couple hours because of of annoying visual glitch that makes all text disappear.
  - johannes_ne 5y ago
    Have you tried switching to Wayland?
    - hsn915 5y ago
      How can people be having this kind of conversation while also claiming this is the state of the art or the gold standard in 2021? I've been running macos since 2012 and never had such issues. That's over 10 years ago. Of course, OS X is older than that, and as far as I can tell, it never had such issues.
      - dagw 5y ago
        I've been running macos since 2012 and never had such issues. Only if you install it on a very short list of approved hardware. Try to install OS X on a random Dell laptop and you will have far greater challenges than what most Linux distros will give you.
        kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
        Can confirm installing macOS on unsupported hardware is very time consuming and makes me wish I had just installed Linux instead. For example, you have to manually map USB ports and install tons of random drivers to your installation media before you can get a working system. Enabling each part of the experience is a whole adventure in itself (eg. audio support requires you to set a value in the bootloader, but there are actually like five values for each kind of audio chip and you have to try each and every one until it works). Also, WiFi support is a nightmare. Worse than I've ever had it on Linux. Even vanilla Windows installs don't always work that well.
sen 5y ago
I daily drive Pop OS on my Thinkpad and love it. It’s just… easy. Everything works out of the box and it’s a nice reliable system for general usage. I used to be all about Arch and heavily modified OSes refined down to minute detail but these days I just want the OS to stay out of my way and let me get my work done, and that’s exactly what Pop OS is good for.
beermonster 5y ago
I’ve never tried Pop!_OS but I hear such good things about it from people that have that’s it’s on my rainy day list of things to have a toy with. That and NixOS - but for very different reasons.
sumthinprofound 5y ago
Writing this on my 12 year old HP Pavilion 23 all-in-one running Pop as a bedside device for streaming video and audio books. It's smooth and responsive even with multiple videos running and flipping between browser tabs.
Darmody 5y ago
I love Pop OS, sadly I had to replace it with Ubuntu on my main laptop with an Nvidia graphics card because of some random crashes where it would close my session and the screen would turn gray with no way to get back from that without rebooting. I've tried everything and I couldn't fix it. Now I'm on Ubuntu missing it every day.
- alexgaribay 5y ago
  Have you tried the installer that contains nvidia drivers already installed?
  - Darmody 5y ago
    Yes, of course, that's the one I used. I had it running maybe for a year until I decided to do a fresh install. that's when the problem started. Not even reinstalling it again solved it.
kvz 5y ago
Wrote a detailed post about my move from macOS to Ubuntu (https://kvz.io/tobuntu.html https://kvz.io/tobuntu.html), and so many seemingly experienced users commented I should try Pop!OS. Now some Ubuntu releases and issues and HN threads like these later, I’m ready to give it a go. Will be installing it this holiday
gtsnexp 5y ago
Is this Debian- Arch- or what?
- curvilinear_m 5y ago
  It is based on Ubuntu
usr1106 5y ago
I am still searching for a replacement of Ubuntu. snap store not being open source made was enough for me after nearly 10 years. Well, not so much for myself. I can handle Arch and whatnot. I am a distro hopper, although a somewhat slow one. Used i3 for years and should probably go back (or to sway). But for family members and relatives whose machines I install and support. Is Pop OS a reasonable candidate for that? The main problem with Ubuntu these days is that I have to tell them sorry no Chromium. If a school's e-learning system does not work with Firefox (or the teacher believes so) that's a problem.
- michelledepeil 5y ago
  Linux mint might be a good candidate. The distro also took a stand against snap(-store), and chrome/chromium works fine afaik.
  - solarkraft 5y ago
    Linux Mint is another great user friendly distro. I mostly see older people using it, presumably due to the traditional UX concept. I originally considered it outdated, but after having a closer look I concluded it’s really not.
- zwarag 5y ago
  chromium can be installed through flathub (which is setup by pop os by default) However, one thing that speaks against it for me as a replacement for Windows users, is that is uses Gnome. I personally love gnome, but I think it is not a good Windows replacement. But If your peers are fine with Gnome I think Pop_OS is a good candidate.
  - Shared404 5y ago
    I've found that people who are the least advanced users tend to adapt faster - "Click here to open $BROWSER and here for $OFFICE" is generally all they need. For people who somewhat know their OS it can be harder, but for all of vanilla GNOME's flaws, Pop's extentions make it excellent, and quite easy to use.
qwerty456127 5y ago
I have tried installing Pop!_OS 21.04 on 2 distinct models of computers - it would fail silently (the installation process sort of ends suspiciously quickly, then it won't boot) so I had to use Ubuntu instead (it still installs and boots without any problems). Pop!_OS 20.10 worked fine.
- thastings 5y ago
  What sort of error did you see, if any? I had a similar issue, but a wiping the disk and setting up partitions again fixed it.
  - misterpopo 5y ago
    Not OP. The usb will add two boot options to the bios menu and grub installation failed with an error if you choose the wrong one. Everything else will work fine, but the installation will fail right at the end. The installation program will tell you to retry installation when that happens, which is kinda weird, because that suggests that they were encountering non deterministic errors when developing the installation program, and it wouldn't have helped in my case anyways. I would've gotten the exact same error message again.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    > What sort of error did you see, if any? No error. The installation seemed complete in some instants (way faster than Ubuntu or the previous Pop OS on the same machine), then GRUB would say it can't boot (I can't remember the exact phrase though but the fact it was GRUB suggests it's not about "secure boot", it was switched off anyway). > but a wiping the disk and setting up partitions again fixed it. In my case it didn't. Perhaps I should try some other way, e.g. text-mode fdisk.
Escapado 5y ago
I switched from xubuntu to pop about two months ago and generally have a good time using it. I like the tiling wm and had to configure very little and except for the crappy WiFi stick everything worked out of the box. Being the idiot that I am I thought I wouldn't need a swap file and now everytime my ram is full my system freezes entirely.
- gerl1ng 5y ago
  You won't need a Swap partition. You might as well create a Swapfile and use it for Swap without the need to repartition the disk. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/swap#Swap_file https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/swap#Swap_file
- eagle2com 5y ago
  earlyoom is your friend, if you don't care that the process with highest memory usage by default gets killed when shit hits the fan. You can protect processes of your choice if you configure it beyond a apt install. http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man1/earlyoom.1.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man1/earlyoom.1.h...
akdor1154 5y ago
Wow, I'm currently writing a USB drive with the 21.10 beta, considering switching from Ubuntu. If I keep using it I'll support them. I want a company that cares about desktop Linux to succeed. For all the good they've done (and that Pop is building on), Canonical don't seem to give a stuff about consumer desktop Linux anymore.
tuananh 5y ago
it's like ubuntu but with little things changes here and there. good thing is they are all the things that I wanted to change about ubuntu :D
ahmedfromtunis 5y ago
I'm confused. A lot of people here coming from Windows and other Linux distros seem to appreciate how easy to use and out of the way is Pop OS. And that's exactly how I'd describe my experience with Ubuntu proper. Can someone who made the transition from Ubuntu to Pop OS tell us how big a difference there are between the two flavors?
- lawl 5y ago
  I'm a long time linux user. One of the things I don't like about ubuntu is their updater stuff. I want to apt-get something, but can't because apparently ubuntu is updating stuff in the background... Or sometimes these a dumb "system has detected a problem, send report?" dialog that pops up all the time. PopOS experience is much better. I get an OS notification about available updates, and with two clicks I can decide to install them and so far, it hasn't harassed me with dumb pop-ups. It's things like these where I find ubuntu very unpolished at times. And as I get older, I just want things to work and get out of my way.
- mindwok 5y ago
  I've used them both pretty extensively as well as Red Hat based distros. For me there's a few minor, but important enough to make me stay on pop, differences: 1. It uses systemd-boot as the boot loader. I like not having a grub menu, just turn on my computer and I'm basically on the login screen. It's seamless. 2. Flathub enabled out of the box. I find Flatpaks the best experience for lots of common apps like Slack, Teams, etc. It's a nice feature. 3. Nvidia support in the ISO/out of the box. Nice experience for Nvidia GPU users. The rest of their stuff, like the windowing features etc, I don't really get much value out of. I like Gnome so I disable most of their stuff.
  - ahmedfromtunis 5y ago
    I really apologize, but this answer only made me even more confused: 1. I don't get the grub menu on any of my Ubuntu machines (except for the one I use to test stuff where many distros co-exist); I "just turn on my computer and I'm basically on the login screen. It's seamless." 2. Same. But with Snap. (I know that many people here don't like snaps for many reasons, and I do too, sometimes. But experience-wise, they're fine and comparable to Flutpaks. It's even possible to add Flathub if one's into that); 3. Installing Nvidia drivers is easy. And they're in the Ubuntu ISO since 19.10; I like Gnome too, but I sure miss Unity so much!
panick21_ 5y ago
I really love the company and use Pop OS. The only thing I would really love for them to do is focus on ZFS out of box experience. Having the default encryption go Native ZFS encryption would be really great.
- Bayart 5y ago
  Excuse me for asking, but why would you use ZFS on a laptop/desktop ? That's the target for PopOS.
  - solarkraft 5y ago
    ZFS has a reputation as being rock-solid and having a ton of features. Both XFS and BTRFS replicate parts of it, but never really the whole thing. ... but I don’t think it should be the focus of a consumer focused distro since that’s quite an advanced functionality.
    - panick21_ 5y ago
      Why not just use the best system, the features being advanced doesn't have to be a problem. The people that build the distro set this up, the users shouldn't really know or care. But ontop of ZFS distors can build great stuff. Ubuntu is moving in that directin as well, but I don't like some of their choices. Still one of the reasons to use Ubuntu over PopOS is the ZFS support.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    There is this myth out there that ZFS is not for desktop/laptop. I have no idea why this is. There is no reason for that thinking. The developers of ZFS were using ZFS on desktop literally before it was finished, it was always intend to do both desktop and servers. Its just that Solaris and FreeBSD systems were primary servers. If ZFS is the best file system, why not just use it? I would really like to use native encrypted ZFS and then to encrypted backups with 'zfs send'. I would like good check sums, snapshots and all the features of ZFS. Its simply overall the best system, I don't think there is really series competition. And the FS is one of the single most important parts of a OS. ZFS could be a major reason why people move to PopOS.
rg111 5y ago
It was all shiny and nice until I started using it. I stopped using Pop OS. I am using Linux Mint and I am very happy with it. The main problem of the OS was its very poor power management. With Kubuntu/Mint, I get about 5.5 hours of battery backup from my laptop and when using Pop, I barely got 3. Yes, I get more than two hours more from using Kubuntu/Mint rather than Pop. The wifi was problematic. I tried common fixes and they did not work. Internet was (testedly) slow always compared to other devices on the same network. These are the main reasons why I decided to leave Pop OS. And then there are those problems which you get from using Linux distros in everyday life. They existed for Pop. This sounds vague. But things go wrong often. Regular Linux users will know. Another major issue I must mention is freezing and outright crashing when the Pop Shop is launched. Installing something new was a costly endeavour. It was also a key factor in my decision to leave PopOS. I have found Linux Mint to be the most usable, lowest maintenance distro out there (Arch requiring the highest maintenance). But I wanted my personal machine to look nice, so I tried Kubuntu, and I like it. I am not going back to Pop. So it's Ubuntu (workstation) + Kubuntu / Mint (personal laptop) for me.
- Filligree 5y ago
  > The main problem of the OS was its very poor power management. With Kubuntu/Mint, I get about 5.5 hours of battery backup from my laptop and when using Pop, I barely got 3. Yes, I get more than two hours more from using Kubuntu/Mint rather than Pop. I had the same experience. However, is your laptop a dual-GPU model? System76 enables hybrid graphics by default; most other distributions don't, and that can account for a significant power draw.
  - rg111 5y ago
    The laptop in discussion does not have even a single GPU.
    - aaomidi 5y ago
      You mean you were software rendering everything? Or there was an igpu?
kingsloi 5y ago
I use a Meerkat as my media/tv/PiHole/CCTV/NAS connection, and PopOS is a really great TV OS, I can't rate it enough.
wilsonfiifi 5y ago
Have been using Pop OS as my daily driver on an i3 NUC10 for the past 9 months and i've got to say the experience has been relatively smooth. The only issues i've encountered so far are the occasional screen flickering when i run the android emulator and printing. But funny enough I'm able to put up with these little inconveniences because after all it's a free OS. I find myself to be much more tolerant than when I was using MacOS and my macbook pro. Between the dead keys, apple tax, dongle life and the OS quirks ...
- pxc 5y ago
  > But funny enough I'm able to put up with these little inconveniences because after all it's a free OS. I find myself to be much more tolerant than when I was using MacOS and my macbook pro. Between the dead keys, apple tax, dongle life and the OS quirks ... For me, this is not so much a matter of cost but of transparency. When there's an annoyance I know I can easily pinpoint to a configuration issue I just haven't had time to play with, or a specific, known kernel module bug whose progress is being tracked publicly, it feels like my issue, my mess. Linux problems feel like bits of clutter I've generated in my home and just haven't gotten around to tidying up yet. MacOS (and to a lesser extent, Windows) problems feel like a finicky and absent roommate's messes: I know little about where they came from (and I might as well not ask); I hope they'll go away on their own, but I really have no idea when they'll be resolved; and often it's best to just avoid touching or thinking about them, much as they annoy me. Problems on non-free operating systems, especially very configuration-limited ones like macOS, are just too opaque and alienating for me to feel like I 'own' them. And that makes them infuriating in a way that Linux problems never are for me.
physicles 5y ago
I switched to Pop OS from Ubuntu about a year ago, and I love it. Stable, good battery life, everything just works. The auto-tiling works well, but what really made me faster was having dedicated keyboard shortcuts for specific apps. For instance, Win+1 switches immediately to the open terminal window, and if it’s not already open, it opens it. Win+2 is the same for VS Code opened to the repo I work in most frequently. Win+3 for chrome, +4 for a text editor, etc. For comfort, on keyboards that don’t have a Win key on the right side, right ctrl gets rebound to that. I don’t even need the dock anymore, because 95% of the time I’m switching between just a few apps. Alt+tab works for the remaining 5%.
JeremyMorgan 5y ago
Pop is my new favorite. I started using it at the urging of friends, and love it. I've written a couple reviews of it on my blog, as it's been my "daily driver" for my laptop for nearly a year. I've been a Linux user since 1995/96, and a die hard Arch user for about 10 years. So why would I want a Linux distro that's super hands-off and easy to use? It's incredibly stable. "Set it and forget it". If I want a bleeding edge version of software I can add it. It's performant, easy, and all my hardware works. It really just "stays out of my way" so I can get work done instead of tinkering. It's nice. I still keep an Arch install around, but when I want to fire up a laptop and get to work without a single problem, Pop has been fantastic for it. I recommend it to new users, as well as old neckbeards like me.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y ago
  ive been wondering. if a new user is switching from windows, don't you think something like kde neon would have "less friction" UX wise ? i somewhat understand the appeal of pop os but gnome is wildly different from windows and i have seen people turn off.
  - kitsunesoba 5y ago
    KDE is certainly closer to Windows than GNOME is, but in my opinion only enough that longtime Windows users would likely find it sitting an uncanny valley of Windows-ness, at least with all the default configurations (which most new users would be using) I've seen. In practice I've found that Cinnamon, XFCE, and MATE configured similarly to how they are by default on Linux Mint to operate more like Windows than KDE does.
  - eitland 5y ago
    Long time KDE fan here. IIRC last time I tried Pop OS it seemed very usable and the only thing that stopped me from using it was some hardware issues on my rig (a faulty drive, not the fault of Pop OS). I especially liked that they try to clean up keyboard shortcuts in a smart way. (For reference my issues with Gnome 3 that they built (built?) on is the we-know-best attitude combined with what I perceive as agressive copying of certain Mac OS features and also not trusting its users.)
seomint 5y ago
I've been a Windows user since the days you typed "win" to start it from DOS and I still manange a small Windows network for a manufacturer in Wisconsin. Last year I finally had enough from Microsoft and made the switch to Pop OS for my daily driver. I haven't looked back. It's a wonderful distro and I'm amazed at how far Linux has come since it's early days in the 90s. Kudos to the System 76 team.
ligerzer0 5y ago
A bit of a sidenote: PopOS came installed on my system76 laptop. But that's not important here. What intrigues me more is that the laptop had terrible battery life. And I mean terrible by even 2010 standards. And I bought it in 2018. It would last less than an hour on average, and less than 40 minutes if I was doing something demanding. I use past term "had" as although I am still using this laptop today, somehow after 3 years, it's battery life has just increased dramatically and completely out of the blue. Somehow I can now use it for over three hours while running off battery life. I've been pretty confused as to how this has happened, and am now wondering if anyone with a system76 might have experienced something similar. I'm really hoping it will go up to nine hours by 2024. It's a great laptop.
- GordonS 5y ago
  At a guess, perhaps PopOS updated something to do with power management.
  - ligerzer0 5y ago
    I tried multiple distros in the first couple months--without notable effect on the battery life, which I should mention for this particular machine, has been subjected to much slander on internet forums--including Ubuntu, Mint, and then Manjaro, which I eventually settled on and it has been running on there to this day.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  I have the same problem. Last time I researched system76, there were at least some models based on the same Clevo laptops as the one I have. I get 2 hours of battery life on these laptops. They have dedicated nvidia GPUs. Due to the poor state of proprietary nvidia drivers, there's no hybrid graphics support. The kernel can't turn the dedicated GPU off and switch to integrated graphics. So it just stays on at all times and those things consume a lot of power. I actually measure the power draw constantly using the nvidia management library and it's very interesting to see all kinds of random software suddenly trigger massive power usage spikes. The hardware-accelerated kitty terminal is a major offender. Turning off the GPU in the firmware settings extended battery life to about 6-7 hours. Maybe system76 worked some kind of miracle here and got hybrid graphics working? That would be amazing.
patwolf 5y ago
I installed Pop OS on my Thinkpad after an OS update on Ubuntu started causing battery drain during suspend. It did fix the battery drain issue. It also had good hybrid graphics support out of the box. I tried their tiling manager for a bit but switched back to i3.
orthoxerox 5y ago
The worst thing about Pop OS is the official styling of its name. "Pop!_OS", who came up with this?
- canadaduane 5y ago
  Funny, I actually like it. It feels both fun & geeky to me.
- DarmokJalad1701 5y ago
  "Pop, pop!"
devwastaken 5y ago
Hey system76 if you're reading this the keys vault has various crashy behavior with different kids of ssh keys. I believe I took a putty exported openssh key and I could not import it via the UI. It's the underlying service that's buggy iirc. There's an existing open issue for it that I cannot find at this moment.
fosshogg 5y ago
The only thing I haven't liked about Pop!_OS in my two years of daily driving has been the name. I think they need to rebrand as 76OS or something a little more professional. But that's so subjective. Oh and I hope they make a laptop with a trackpoint eventually! I know that's the one thing preventing me from making the switch to their HW.

203 points by robfig 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

[edit] Pop OS made my macbook air 2012 usable and it became a delight to hack on Rust even given the hw limitations. Their attention to detail on top of a distro that I already respect for that is awesome. Long live Pop OS.

graynk 5y ago

I've been using Pop OS as my daily driver for several years now on my desktop with Nvidia videocard. Never before have I experienced such a stable Linux distro.

encryptluks2 5y ago

This tiling feature looks just like i3 or Sway.. pretty sure it is using it under the hood. Not sure why they changed the default shortcuts though, nor why they want to rename everything under the Pop OS brand.. rather than just give credit to the real contributors.

fish45 5y ago
https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell You're wrong
- encryptluks2 5y ago
  So a copycat implemented in JavaScript.
  - vimacs2 5y ago
    You sound like somebody who's sampled a grand total of 1 tiling wm and now thinks they know the field. You do not. By your reasoning, i3 is a copycat of ION or wmii and shouldn't have even bothered. There is plenty of room in the market for more tiling wm's. Yes, you can technically run i3 in conjunction with Gnome but then you are essentially losing all the QoL and floating features of Mutter including the expose view which I use heavily.
nitinreddy88 5y ago
Its neither i3 nor Sway. Its their own implementation on top of GNOME. i3, sway are too complicated for first time users and requires lot of configuration and tweaks. Personally I found Pop Shell is the best thing that can get anyone started with simple toggle on/off, customisation of shortcuts and available out of the box. https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
d_tr 5y ago
It's written in TypeScript...
hakube 5y ago
It's using GNOME extensions. GNOME has it's own window manager called Mutter. You should Google stuff first before leaving comments like this
nsonha 5y ago
Don't all tilling VMs look alike (they have no look)? This is much more mouse friendly than i3 default.
anaganisk 5y ago
May be you should check your case before making accusations? You can you be so sure yet so wrong.

perihelions 5y ago

If you're interested in the tiling features of Pop OS, they're also available as a standalone extension for GNOME Shell. Very little friction to test them out (if you're already running GNOME). https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-shell/ https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-shell/

nsonha 5y ago
I just want to open all windows floating and being able to manually snap windows in to a 3 columns grid, can this do it?
- FieryTransition 5y ago
  Try a gnome extension called gtile
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - nsonha 5y ago
    It's not keyboard-driven, that's a bummer. In the past, I used an extension called Put Windows that was perfect for my need, but that stopped working on Gnome 40.
    - d_tr 5y ago
      I used Gnome for a while and I just made my own very simple extension then, which was just a bunch of keybindings to move and resize the focused window. Super for a 2x2 grid or Super + Shift for a 3x2 grid, plus a Numpad key to place the window on the grid. I guess it would still work with 40 because of how simple it was, but even if not, it would most probably be trivial to update, so you might want to consider this route.
- rablackburn 5y ago
  Nope, I want the same thing and just turned off the tiling desktop feature because it was easier to manually juggle them.

amatecha 5y ago

This is funny, I am literally in the middle of writing an ISO of this OS to a USB stick to try installing on my laptop. I've been trying to find a good linux distro for a "2-in-1" laptop that has a stylus (Surface, Yoga, etc.)... Pop!_OS came up as a strong contender in discussions/posts I could find online. Guess I'll find out shortly! :)

askvictor 5y ago
Same, am currently re-partitioning to install Pop (via Ventoy USB as was posted yesterday).
amatecha 5y ago
Just to update, I was impressed with Pop!_OS on my "2-in-1". Turned on virtual keyboard under Accessibility settings, and got to drawing in Krita. I bound one of the buttons on the front of the screen to "undo" in Krita. Works quite well, though there are some issues I'll have to figure out, but so far Pop!_OS was the best by far of the ones I've tried. I was able to use all kinds of applications without issue. Going to install this as the long-term OS once I get an SSD to drop in this machine! Woot :)

Shared404 5y ago

As far as I'm concerned, this is the current gold standard for out-of-box experience desktop Linux. There are things I would do differently if I were building a system myself, but PopOS "Just Works", and is more polished than Win10 imho.

toastercat 5y ago
Installed it on a Dell XPS13 recently. It's great except I have to restart GNOME every couple hours because of of annoying visual glitch that makes all text disappear.
- johannes_ne 5y ago
  Have you tried switching to Wayland?
  - hsn915 5y ago
    How can people be having this kind of conversation while also claiming this is the state of the art or the gold standard in 2021? I've been running macos since 2012 and never had such issues. That's over 10 years ago. Of course, OS X is older than that, and as far as I can tell, it never had such issues.
    - dagw 5y ago
      I've been running macos since 2012 and never had such issues. Only if you install it on a very short list of approved hardware. Try to install OS X on a random Dell laptop and you will have far greater challenges than what most Linux distros will give you.
      - kaladin-jasnah 5y ago
        Can confirm installing macOS on unsupported hardware is very time consuming and makes me wish I had just installed Linux instead. For example, you have to manually map USB ports and install tons of random drivers to your installation media before you can get a working system. Enabling each part of the experience is a whole adventure in itself (eg. audio support requires you to set a value in the bootloader, but there are actually like five values for each kind of audio chip and you have to try each and every one until it works). Also, WiFi support is a nightmare. Worse than I've ever had it on Linux. Even vanilla Windows installs don't always work that well.

sen 5y ago

I daily drive Pop OS on my Thinkpad and love it. It’s just… easy. Everything works out of the box and it’s a nice reliable system for general usage. I used to be all about Arch and heavily modified OSes refined down to minute detail but these days I just want the OS to stay out of my way and let me get my work done, and that’s exactly what Pop OS is good for.

beermonster 5y ago

I’ve never tried Pop!_OS but I hear such good things about it from people that have that’s it’s on my rainy day list of things to have a toy with. That and NixOS - but for very different reasons.

sumthinprofound 5y ago

Writing this on my 12 year old HP Pavilion 23 all-in-one running Pop as a bedside device for streaming video and audio books. It's smooth and responsive even with multiple videos running and flipping between browser tabs.

Darmody 5y ago

I love Pop OS, sadly I had to replace it with Ubuntu on my main laptop with an Nvidia graphics card because of some random crashes where it would close my session and the screen would turn gray with no way to get back from that without rebooting. I've tried everything and I couldn't fix it. Now I'm on Ubuntu missing it every day.

alexgaribay 5y ago
Have you tried the installer that contains nvidia drivers already installed?
- Darmody 5y ago
  Yes, of course, that's the one I used. I had it running maybe for a year until I decided to do a fresh install. that's when the problem started. Not even reinstalling it again solved it.

kvz 5y ago

Wrote a detailed post about my move from macOS to Ubuntu (https://kvz.io/tobuntu.html https://kvz.io/tobuntu.html), and so many seemingly experienced users commented I should try Pop!OS. Now some Ubuntu releases and issues and HN threads like these later, I’m ready to give it a go. Will be installing it this holiday

gtsnexp 5y ago

Is this Debian- Arch- or what?

curvilinear_m 5y ago
It is based on Ubuntu

usr1106 5y ago

I am still searching for a replacement of Ubuntu. snap store not being open source made was enough for me after nearly 10 years. Well, not so much for myself. I can handle Arch and whatnot. I am a distro hopper, although a somewhat slow one. Used i3 for years and should probably go back (or to sway). But for family members and relatives whose machines I install and support. Is Pop OS a reasonable candidate for that? The main problem with Ubuntu these days is that I have to tell them sorry no Chromium. If a school's e-learning system does not work with Firefox (or the teacher believes so) that's a problem.

michelledepeil 5y ago
Linux mint might be a good candidate. The distro also took a stand against snap(-store), and chrome/chromium works fine afaik.
- solarkraft 5y ago
  Linux Mint is another great user friendly distro. I mostly see older people using it, presumably due to the traditional UX concept. I originally considered it outdated, but after having a closer look I concluded it’s really not.
zwarag 5y ago
chromium can be installed through flathub (which is setup by pop os by default) However, one thing that speaks against it for me as a replacement for Windows users, is that is uses Gnome. I personally love gnome, but I think it is not a good Windows replacement. But If your peers are fine with Gnome I think Pop_OS is a good candidate.
- Shared404 5y ago
  I've found that people who are the least advanced users tend to adapt faster - "Click here to open $BROWSER and here for $OFFICE" is generally all they need. For people who somewhat know their OS it can be harder, but for all of vanilla GNOME's flaws, Pop's extentions make it excellent, and quite easy to use.

qwerty456127 5y ago

I have tried installing Pop!_OS 21.04 on 2 distinct models of computers - it would fail silently (the installation process sort of ends suspiciously quickly, then it won't boot) so I had to use Ubuntu instead (it still installs and boots without any problems). Pop!_OS 20.10 worked fine.

thastings 5y ago
What sort of error did you see, if any? I had a similar issue, but a wiping the disk and setting up partitions again fixed it.
- misterpopo 5y ago
  Not OP. The usb will add two boot options to the bios menu and grub installation failed with an error if you choose the wrong one. Everything else will work fine, but the installation will fail right at the end. The installation program will tell you to retry installation when that happens, which is kinda weird, because that suggests that they were encountering non deterministic errors when developing the installation program, and it wouldn't have helped in my case anyways. I would've gotten the exact same error message again.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  > What sort of error did you see, if any? No error. The installation seemed complete in some instants (way faster than Ubuntu or the previous Pop OS on the same machine), then GRUB would say it can't boot (I can't remember the exact phrase though but the fact it was GRUB suggests it's not about "secure boot", it was switched off anyway). > but a wiping the disk and setting up partitions again fixed it. In my case it didn't. Perhaps I should try some other way, e.g. text-mode fdisk.

Escapado 5y ago

I switched from xubuntu to pop about two months ago and generally have a good time using it. I like the tiling wm and had to configure very little and except for the crappy WiFi stick everything worked out of the box. Being the idiot that I am I thought I wouldn't need a swap file and now everytime my ram is full my system freezes entirely.

gerl1ng 5y ago
You won't need a Swap partition. You might as well create a Swapfile and use it for Swap without the need to repartition the disk. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/swap#Swap_file https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/swap#Swap_file
eagle2com 5y ago
earlyoom is your friend, if you don't care that the process with highest memory usage by default gets killed when shit hits the fan. You can protect processes of your choice if you configure it beyond a apt install. http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man1/earlyoom.1.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man1/earlyoom.1.h...

akdor1154 5y ago

Wow, I'm currently writing a USB drive with the 21.10 beta, considering switching from Ubuntu. If I keep using it I'll support them. I want a company that cares about desktop Linux to succeed. For all the good they've done (and that Pop is building on), Canonical don't seem to give a stuff about consumer desktop Linux anymore.

tuananh 5y ago

it's like ubuntu but with little things changes here and there. good thing is they are all the things that I wanted to change about ubuntu :D

ahmedfromtunis 5y ago

I'm confused. A lot of people here coming from Windows and other Linux distros seem to appreciate how easy to use and out of the way is Pop OS. And that's exactly how I'd describe my experience with Ubuntu proper. Can someone who made the transition from Ubuntu to Pop OS tell us how big a difference there are between the two flavors?

lawl 5y ago
I'm a long time linux user. One of the things I don't like about ubuntu is their updater stuff. I want to apt-get something, but can't because apparently ubuntu is updating stuff in the background... Or sometimes these a dumb "system has detected a problem, send report?" dialog that pops up all the time. PopOS experience is much better. I get an OS notification about available updates, and with two clicks I can decide to install them and so far, it hasn't harassed me with dumb pop-ups. It's things like these where I find ubuntu very unpolished at times. And as I get older, I just want things to work and get out of my way.
mindwok 5y ago
I've used them both pretty extensively as well as Red Hat based distros. For me there's a few minor, but important enough to make me stay on pop, differences: 1. It uses systemd-boot as the boot loader. I like not having a grub menu, just turn on my computer and I'm basically on the login screen. It's seamless. 2. Flathub enabled out of the box. I find Flatpaks the best experience for lots of common apps like Slack, Teams, etc. It's a nice feature. 3. Nvidia support in the ISO/out of the box. Nice experience for Nvidia GPU users. The rest of their stuff, like the windowing features etc, I don't really get much value out of. I like Gnome so I disable most of their stuff.
- ahmedfromtunis 5y ago
  I really apologize, but this answer only made me even more confused: 1. I don't get the grub menu on any of my Ubuntu machines (except for the one I use to test stuff where many distros co-exist); I "just turn on my computer and I'm basically on the login screen. It's seamless." 2. Same. But with Snap. (I know that many people here don't like snaps for many reasons, and I do too, sometimes. But experience-wise, they're fine and comparable to Flutpaks. It's even possible to add Flathub if one's into that); 3. Installing Nvidia drivers is easy. And they're in the Ubuntu ISO since 19.10; I like Gnome too, but I sure miss Unity so much!

panick21_ 5y ago

I really love the company and use Pop OS. The only thing I would really love for them to do is focus on ZFS out of box experience. Having the default encryption go Native ZFS encryption would be really great.

Bayart 5y ago
Excuse me for asking, but why would you use ZFS on a laptop/desktop ? That's the target for PopOS.
- solarkraft 5y ago
  ZFS has a reputation as being rock-solid and having a ton of features. Both XFS and BTRFS replicate parts of it, but never really the whole thing. ... but I don’t think it should be the focus of a consumer focused distro since that’s quite an advanced functionality.
  - panick21_ 5y ago
    Why not just use the best system, the features being advanced doesn't have to be a problem. The people that build the distro set this up, the users shouldn't really know or care. But ontop of ZFS distors can build great stuff. Ubuntu is moving in that directin as well, but I don't like some of their choices. Still one of the reasons to use Ubuntu over PopOS is the ZFS support.
- panick21_ 5y ago
  There is this myth out there that ZFS is not for desktop/laptop. I have no idea why this is. There is no reason for that thinking. The developers of ZFS were using ZFS on desktop literally before it was finished, it was always intend to do both desktop and servers. Its just that Solaris and FreeBSD systems were primary servers. If ZFS is the best file system, why not just use it? I would really like to use native encrypted ZFS and then to encrypted backups with 'zfs send'. I would like good check sums, snapshots and all the features of ZFS. Its simply overall the best system, I don't think there is really series competition. And the FS is one of the single most important parts of a OS. ZFS could be a major reason why people move to PopOS.

rg111 5y ago

It was all shiny and nice until I started using it. I stopped using Pop OS. I am using Linux Mint and I am very happy with it. The main problem of the OS was its very poor power management. With Kubuntu/Mint, I get about 5.5 hours of battery backup from my laptop and when using Pop, I barely got 3. Yes, I get more than two hours more from using Kubuntu/Mint rather than Pop. The wifi was problematic. I tried common fixes and they did not work. Internet was (testedly) slow always compared to other devices on the same network. These are the main reasons why I decided to leave Pop OS. And then there are those problems which you get from using Linux distros in everyday life. They existed for Pop. This sounds vague. But things go wrong often. Regular Linux users will know. Another major issue I must mention is freezing and outright crashing when the Pop Shop is launched. Installing something new was a costly endeavour. It was also a key factor in my decision to leave PopOS. I have found Linux Mint to be the most usable, lowest maintenance distro out there (Arch requiring the highest maintenance). But I wanted my personal machine to look nice, so I tried Kubuntu, and I like it. I am not going back to Pop. So it's Ubuntu (workstation) + Kubuntu / Mint (personal laptop) for me.

Filligree 5y ago
> The main problem of the OS was its very poor power management. With Kubuntu/Mint, I get about 5.5 hours of battery backup from my laptop and when using Pop, I barely got 3. Yes, I get more than two hours more from using Kubuntu/Mint rather than Pop. I had the same experience. However, is your laptop a dual-GPU model? System76 enables hybrid graphics by default; most other distributions don't, and that can account for a significant power draw.
- rg111 5y ago
  The laptop in discussion does not have even a single GPU.
  - aaomidi 5y ago
    You mean you were software rendering everything? Or there was an igpu?

kingsloi 5y ago

I use a Meerkat as my media/tv/PiHole/CCTV/NAS connection, and PopOS is a really great TV OS, I can't rate it enough.

wilsonfiifi 5y ago

Have been using Pop OS as my daily driver on an i3 NUC10 for the past 9 months and i've got to say the experience has been relatively smooth. The only issues i've encountered so far are the occasional screen flickering when i run the android emulator and printing. But funny enough I'm able to put up with these little inconveniences because after all it's a free OS. I find myself to be much more tolerant than when I was using MacOS and my macbook pro. Between the dead keys, apple tax, dongle life and the OS quirks ...

pxc 5y ago
> But funny enough I'm able to put up with these little inconveniences because after all it's a free OS. I find myself to be much more tolerant than when I was using MacOS and my macbook pro. Between the dead keys, apple tax, dongle life and the OS quirks ... For me, this is not so much a matter of cost but of transparency. When there's an annoyance I know I can easily pinpoint to a configuration issue I just haven't had time to play with, or a specific, known kernel module bug whose progress is being tracked publicly, it feels like my issue, my mess. Linux problems feel like bits of clutter I've generated in my home and just haven't gotten around to tidying up yet. MacOS (and to a lesser extent, Windows) problems feel like a finicky and absent roommate's messes: I know little about where they came from (and I might as well not ask); I hope they'll go away on their own, but I really have no idea when they'll be resolved; and often it's best to just avoid touching or thinking about them, much as they annoy me. Problems on non-free operating systems, especially very configuration-limited ones like macOS, are just too opaque and alienating for me to feel like I 'own' them. And that makes them infuriating in a way that Linux problems never are for me.

physicles 5y ago

I switched to Pop OS from Ubuntu about a year ago, and I love it. Stable, good battery life, everything just works. The auto-tiling works well, but what really made me faster was having dedicated keyboard shortcuts for specific apps. For instance, Win+1 switches immediately to the open terminal window, and if it’s not already open, it opens it. Win+2 is the same for VS Code opened to the repo I work in most frequently. Win+3 for chrome, +4 for a text editor, etc. For comfort, on keyboards that don’t have a Win key on the right side, right ctrl gets rebound to that. I don’t even need the dock anymore, because 95% of the time I’m switching between just a few apps. Alt+tab works for the remaining 5%.

JeremyMorgan 5y ago

Pop is my new favorite. I started using it at the urging of friends, and love it. I've written a couple reviews of it on my blog, as it's been my "daily driver" for my laptop for nearly a year. I've been a Linux user since 1995/96, and a die hard Arch user for about 10 years. So why would I want a Linux distro that's super hands-off and easy to use? It's incredibly stable. "Set it and forget it". If I want a bleeding edge version of software I can add it. It's performant, easy, and all my hardware works. It really just "stays out of my way" so I can get work done instead of tinkering. It's nice. I still keep an Arch install around, but when I want to fire up a laptop and get to work without a single problem, Pop has been fantastic for it. I recommend it to new users, as well as old neckbeards like me.

2Gkashmiri 5y ago
ive been wondering. if a new user is switching from windows, don't you think something like kde neon would have "less friction" UX wise ? i somewhat understand the appeal of pop os but gnome is wildly different from windows and i have seen people turn off.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  KDE is certainly closer to Windows than GNOME is, but in my opinion only enough that longtime Windows users would likely find it sitting an uncanny valley of Windows-ness, at least with all the default configurations (which most new users would be using) I've seen. In practice I've found that Cinnamon, XFCE, and MATE configured similarly to how they are by default on Linux Mint to operate more like Windows than KDE does.
- eitland 5y ago
  Long time KDE fan here. IIRC last time I tried Pop OS it seemed very usable and the only thing that stopped me from using it was some hardware issues on my rig (a faulty drive, not the fault of Pop OS). I especially liked that they try to clean up keyboard shortcuts in a smart way. (For reference my issues with Gnome 3 that they built (built?) on is the we-know-best attitude combined with what I perceive as agressive copying of certain Mac OS features and also not trusting its users.)

seomint 5y ago

I've been a Windows user since the days you typed "win" to start it from DOS and I still manange a small Windows network for a manufacturer in Wisconsin. Last year I finally had enough from Microsoft and made the switch to Pop OS for my daily driver. I haven't looked back. It's a wonderful distro and I'm amazed at how far Linux has come since it's early days in the 90s. Kudos to the System 76 team.

ligerzer0 5y ago

A bit of a sidenote: PopOS came installed on my system76 laptop. But that's not important here. What intrigues me more is that the laptop had terrible battery life. And I mean terrible by even 2010 standards. And I bought it in 2018. It would last less than an hour on average, and less than 40 minutes if I was doing something demanding. I use past term "had" as although I am still using this laptop today, somehow after 3 years, it's battery life has just increased dramatically and completely out of the blue. Somehow I can now use it for over three hours while running off battery life. I've been pretty confused as to how this has happened, and am now wondering if anyone with a system76 might have experienced something similar. I'm really hoping it will go up to nine hours by 2024. It's a great laptop.

GordonS 5y ago
At a guess, perhaps PopOS updated something to do with power management.
- ligerzer0 5y ago
  I tried multiple distros in the first couple months--without notable effect on the battery life, which I should mention for this particular machine, has been subjected to much slander on internet forums--including Ubuntu, Mint, and then Manjaro, which I eventually settled on and it has been running on there to this day.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
I have the same problem. Last time I researched system76, there were at least some models based on the same Clevo laptops as the one I have. I get 2 hours of battery life on these laptops. They have dedicated nvidia GPUs. Due to the poor state of proprietary nvidia drivers, there's no hybrid graphics support. The kernel can't turn the dedicated GPU off and switch to integrated graphics. So it just stays on at all times and those things consume a lot of power. I actually measure the power draw constantly using the nvidia management library and it's very interesting to see all kinds of random software suddenly trigger massive power usage spikes. The hardware-accelerated kitty terminal is a major offender. Turning off the GPU in the firmware settings extended battery life to about 6-7 hours. Maybe system76 worked some kind of miracle here and got hybrid graphics working? That would be amazing.

patwolf 5y ago

I installed Pop OS on my Thinkpad after an OS update on Ubuntu started causing battery drain during suspend. It did fix the battery drain issue. It also had good hybrid graphics support out of the box. I tried their tiling manager for a bit but switched back to i3.

orthoxerox 5y ago

The worst thing about Pop OS is the official styling of its name. "Pop!_OS", who came up with this?

canadaduane 5y ago
Funny, I actually like it. It feels both fun & geeky to me.
DarmokJalad1701 5y ago
"Pop, pop!"

devwastaken 5y ago

Hey system76 if you're reading this the keys vault has various crashy behavior with different kids of ssh keys. I believe I took a putty exported openssh key and I could not import it via the UI. It's the underlying service that's buggy iirc. There's an existing open issue for it that I cannot find at this moment.

fosshogg 5y ago

The only thing I haven't liked about Pop!_OS in my two years of daily driving has been the name. I think they need to rebrand as 76OS or something a little more professional. But that's so subjective. Oh and I hope they make a laptop with a trackpoint eventually! I know that's the one thing preventing me from making the switch to their HW.