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Comment by proverbialbunny | Hacker News Reader

For anyone who has used Pop OS how does it compare to Mint?

Mint feels more like Windows (but better) with task bar and start menu. Pop is more like Mac with dock and app launcher, but a little less polish. I had to use some Gnome extensions on Pop make it how I like it (for example, to have the dock locked on screen).

On a newer hardware, I'd go with Pop because it's more up-to-date with drivers (esp. nvidia) and linux kernel. In my case, linux kernel version did matter for me because I had a weird start-up issue that was fixed in latest kernels.

You can easily install newer kernels on Mint.

Open Upgrade Manager -> View (Third Menu) -> Linux Kernels

You can choose from the backported kernels from 18.10 and 19.04 ATM, guess the kernel from 19.10 will be availlable soon.

That way i got to undervolt my AMD GPU without a fuzz.

In my experience it was slightly better, but then most of my problems with Mint were because of Cinnamon. Not sure if drivers or just Cinnamon’s compositor, but Cinnamon would become really choppy at times. Pop is smooth and painless to install. I ended up moving to Manjaro and Plasma eventually, but I’d recommend.

It's cpu vsync. It sucks. It's the only thing I change on Mint.

I install my graphics drivers (nvidia), go to the nvidia settings control panel, turn on full composition (run the desktop through the gpu) which enables vsync on the graphics card. I then go into general (settings) and set vsync to none, disabling cpu vsync. This makes Mint as smooth as butter. It also improves youtube playback quite a bit.

Oh, that makes sense. It definitely affects Plasma to a certain extent too. The default compositor uses OpenGL 2.0 and I could feel some amount of subperceptual lag that annoyed the crap of me after a bit. Switched to XRender and things have been great since.

Ever try Manjaro for games?

I'm not a power user. But I've been using Linux as my main desktop UI, usually Ubuntu, for the past dozen years or more. And I absolutely love PopOS on my system76 machine. It works flawlessly.

Pop OS uses Gnome 3.

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