Pop OS – System76
pop.system76.com
pop.system76.com
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.
Have a look at the Ubuntu LTS page: https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop
And then look at the Debian equivalent: https://www.debian.org/lts/
(though the differences are perhaps because the latter is comparatively more unofficial)
But hey, many people prefer more stable distros with somewhat long life times, so that's a valid preference nonetheless.
Disclaimer: mostly a Debian user, i dread having to migrate from 10 to 11, but hey, at least i can use Ansible for all of my servers this time around.
Many aren't even aware that Debian has LTS releases in the first place.
I think Ubuntu has the benefit of the large user base making it more likely that your problem is solved.
My laptop is also a 5 year old thinkpad x1 gen 4 so it should be supported, and Debian is the only linux that gave me this problem.
I second the recommendation for using Debian as a rolling distro, under testing or unstable.
Always tell other people you use Arch Linux.
Isn't it just Ubuntu with slightly (basically introduces tiling) different shell? What is there to review?
I had some problem in the past with a laptop with Intel GPU + AMD GPU interchangeable graphics in other distros while with Pop is ready to use after installing. AFAIK, those who had Nvidia Optimus and similar Nvidia technologies had a lot more of troubles outside Pop.
I haven't used Ubuntu in ages, so I don't know how those things are actually managed. Probably they aren't far behind.
I think it's important to remember that System 76 has been "making Linux work on hardware" for over a decade now, which is a totally different mindset to building a distro than most maintainers have.
- Great initial repo list
- Togglable tiling manager
- Excellent shortcuts for everything that improve my workflow
Sure, I could get all of this stuff and more working on any other distro, but this stuff works out of the box, and is stable.
https://launchpad.net/~lubomir-brindza/+archive/ubuntu/nauti...
Works great for me!
Canonical has been pushing very hard for snaps and it shows when I get get official builds of things like Zoom, Visual Studio Code, JetBrains and Spotify but the flatpak versions are just community provided. Some of them tend to work better than flatpak as well because of “classic” confinement. Using VS Code in flatpak and not having full access to the system in my integrated terminal kinda sucks. It might not be better from a security perspective but it’s much better from a user experience perspective and that matters more to me personally.
The said I still use flatpak as well, and prefer to use flatpak if there isn’t a material difference in functionality between the snap and flatpak.
Rarely have I come across an eatery that serves IT.
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.
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.)
Kubuntu is probably just right.
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.
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.
I haven't used Pop!_OS much lately, but from what I remember at the time I received the system with Pop!_OS preinstalled there were options in the main menu (alongside shut down / reboot) to switch between integrated and discrete graphics. The change involved a system reboot, and there wasn't any support for hybrid graphics.
This is new to me! I'll try it out one of these days. Last time I dealt with this stuff bumblebee was still in use. There was also a hack to spawn a second hardware-accelerated X server.
The primus-vk-nvidia stack still uses Bumblebee. It replaces the original PRIMUS component with a version that shares the image data through the Vulkan APIs, which seems to have fewer issues with incompatible OpenGL versions (even when both the app and the compositor are using OpenGL and not Vulkan). Perhaps something about Vulkan being designed from the start to support multiple vendor backends in the same process, vs. OpenGL where you generally have to load a single vendor's implementation?
There is also "Auto CPUfreq", but I have not tried it yet. Automatic CPU speed & power optimizer for Linux: https://github.com/AdnanHodzic/auto-cpufreq
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.
Personally also think Mac is going the way of windows, I have to use it for testing safari sometimes the OS is an absolute nightmare to use, always popping up asking for my password or fingerprint or some other password, or some other permission, it's just a whole bunch of antipatterns.
But damn if that hardware isn’t the best.
I’m torn on how best to switch to linux as a daily driver considering how much I depend on the very customized workflow I have running on my Mac.
ThinkPads mostly just work (they use Ubuntu to run their acceptance tests before shipping). You do sometimes run into issues for a couple months on new machine releases while kernel catches up but having enough Linux users running them means things get fixed eventually unlike on say system76. Dell xps works about as well if that's more your style.
In the Bad Old Days, this was true-having Linux developers using your Windows hardware would ensure it's eventually mostly supported. Note the "eventually" and "mostly."
System76 ships with Ubuntu or Pop! OS, and they support it for up three years. This is a _huge_ improvement. System76 makes sure both that Linux supports he hardware, but also that the _hardware_ supports _Linux._ This is night-and-day different from the bad old days.
Section "Device" Identifier "Intel Graphics" Driver "intel" Option "TearFree" "true" EndSection
Might fix your issues.
Section "Device"
Identifier "Intel Graphics"
Driver "intel"
Option "TearFree" "true"
EndSectionWhy would anyone without an Nvidia card be using X? You have to go out of your way to use this antiquated and deprecated technology with Gnome nowadays and screen tearing is specifically one of its problems.
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.
And as the sibling to this comment points out, Pop only officially support their own hardware, where this would never happen.
Edit: It also seems worth pointing out that the reasons these conversations are had is that it can be fixed. Mac and Windows? Not so much in my experience. Working in a repair shop I have seen some things out of both of those that make bug's like this one look minor (remember when Windows updates decided user data didn't matter?), and there's nothing/not much you can do about it.
Keyboard navigation (moving between or selecting words or lines of text) still seems somewhat hit or miss even though it is better than when I left Mac OS behind in 2012.
Of course this might not matter to you (and I even know some of you prefer the separation between "application switching" and "window switching") but for many of us these are way larger issues than having to fix a config file once.
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.
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.
Do you expect to run OS X on just about any machine and not have any issues?
They're under no obligation to test it on Dell machines, of course. The community should be doing that.
Definitely don't think System76 has that big a QA team, though, will have to be community supported as well.
OS X is great for specific use cases and specific users. If you want Linux, OP is saying PopOS is the gold standard. OS X isn’t exactly in the same vein.
You're right that it still sucks, but this isn't a matter of Wayland being insufficiently 'advanced'. This is about relationships between enterprises as much as it is about technical challenges.
I tried Gtile on Fedora but found it wanting to emulate more of Linux's auto-tiling interfaces, which isn't what I want when using floating windows some of the time.
The Pop-Shell extension mentioned above was the best floating + tiling experience I'd used so far. Floating windows work like normal until you hit super+y where they'll begin to auto-tile & try to find sane spacing for the different windows onscreen.
You can cycle through those windows (and I believe resize them too) with keyboard commands, but also resize and drag around them with the mouse like normal. You can even drag them on top of each other to create "tabbed" windows behind one another with little selectors at the top.
I used this recently on a 12.5" (1080p) screen to reference Firefox on one half, while having my terminal, file browser, and text editor all "tabbed" on top of each other in the other half. Made it really smooth to fit all that into a small screen in a way that felt sane & easy to multitask with. I'd highly recommend trying that extension out and seeing if it can fill your needs, even if it's not 100% trying to fill Fancyzone's role.
I don't find the tilling feature useful at all and of course this is my personal gripe with tilling in general.
The last thing you want is having your windows perfect then ANY new window or dialog open automatically messes it up and you have to "re-organize" every time. Setting layout should be a one and done thing.
In the past, I used an extension called Put Windows that was perfect for my need, but that stopped working on Gnome 40.
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.
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.
My father, who barely knows how to operate a computer, has been using it for years without the need for support. No forced updates/reboots. I only run a system upgrade every year or so, which also is a one button operation whitout any problems. It is a super stable experience for him as a user and me as an admin.
I tried PopOS for my SO, but it was to nerdy and the GNOME experience was to tweaked. I then went for Fedora and she likes it much better, comming from mac-land.
How's this working with regard to discoverability? Asking out of general curiosity; I haven't supported anybody else with a Linux desktop in years, and I'm fine with Gnome for my own workflow and habits, but I've always wondered if the lack of always-visible app launchers or an obvious menu in stock Gnome wouldn't be an issue for those who don't already know what and where to look.
> No forced updates/reboots. I only run a system upgrade every year or so, which also is a one button operation whitout any problems.
If these are the only updates run on that computer, wouldn't that leave e.g. browsers unpatched for quite long periods of time?
He quickly learned to use the super key or the upper left corner to go to the overview. He mainly uses the browser and the email app anyway so he does not multitask that much.
> If these are the only updates run on that computer, wouldn't that leave e.g. browsers unpatched for quite long periods of time?
Fedora has an option to auto-update apps on reboot (not sure if it is default or not). He does not reboot often, but it happens often enough that it stays reasonably up to date. The updates are seamless and not forced, so he never experience any interuptions.
I originally considered it outdated, but after having a closer look I concluded it’s really not.
I tried PopOS at one point, to see what it was about. And, I honestly don't understand what it adds to the table. It felt like many minor things were changed to be different, but overall it had the same things I wanted. After being annoyed for a couple of days, I installed Ubuntu, removed snap, and everything is pleasant again.
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.
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.
I use arch on my workstation / laptops for various reasons. For homelab boxes and the htpc I use fedora, easy to install and everything just works.
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.
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.
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.
I do have 1 issue that I didn't see you mention, the trackpad will randomly not work. I have to put the computer back to sleep and re-wake it up and it works.
Have you made a bug report?
With the previous Kubuntu installation, the VLC wouldn't fully close.
It would show up in the list of processes and also in the tray.
Turned out it was a common bug and I had to manually kill the process using flag -9.
It got fixed in the current version.
There are small problems rampant with desktop Linux distros that get in your way.
I have been using Linux as my daily driver since four years ago.
You can try and compare apple to Linux like that if you want but it's like complaining it's apples fault for docker on Mac sucking.
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?
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.
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!
For the last year I installed both Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and 21.04. Both times I had to opt out of installing proprietary drivers during installation to avoid getting a system freeze. Then, on first boot, I would open a new session before I even log in and install updates and nvidia drivers from there. Any attempts of using the GUI to install them would result to freezing. With Pop I never had to go through these loops, I just installed the Nvidia ISO and I was good to go.
I also get grub menu on startup with Ubuntu. It's like 3 or 5 seconds long but it's there, and I use EFI. But it's not a deal-breaker.
Snap is much worse at dependency sharing than Flatpak, which is surprisingly okay at it despite the container-based approach. This means that after you install your first one or two Snaps or Flatpaks, Flatpak is several times faster than Snap.
Snap has pretty atrocious download sizes and install times, plus noticeably slower app start times, even on NVMe and very fast internet. I definitely recommend directly comparing them.
(Keep both around of course, to leave whichever as a last resort for what's missing from the other.)
For those on other distros wondering about this behavior and whether they can get it: systemd-boot does support menus, and GRUB also supports bypassing the menu. Systemd-boot is quite good though. It's simpler to configure and less feature-complete than GRUB, and a great first choice for EFI setups.
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.
Pop OS removes that. They also round some other UX corners and customize the desktop a bit.
Pop OS is essentially Ubuntu with a few enhancements. It is not a very different experience. I like the zero-effort, zero-config window tiling, and the 1-click disk encryption. But it's mainly like Ubuntu with a couple hours saved by delegating configuring some stuff and making a few choices to System76.
(I'm running it on a pretty standard Intel+NVIDIA+ASRock PC assembled by a local builder.)
Ubuntu I cant stand the color and icon style each time I try, pop os it feels beautiful. Almost like a macos interface.
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
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.
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%.
I've tried everything and I couldn't fix it. Now I'm on Ubuntu missing it every day.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/bionic/man1/earlyoom.1.h...
Having the default encryption go Native ZFS encryption would be really great.
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.
It's a pretty shit file system for a single OS or a software development drive, unless you really need snapshots (you don't).
ZFS is made for big arrays of drives with lots of RAM. If that's not your use case, you're just wasting time and energy for the sake of it.
With ZFS Boot Environments you are bulletproof on upgrades and major changes.
Moar here: https://is.gd/BECTL
... but I don’t think it should be the focus of a consumer focused distro since that’s quite an advanced functionality.
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.
good thing is they are all the things that I wanted to change about ubuntu :D
You're wrong
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.