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Comment by MichaelRazum | Hacker News Reader

What is exactly the benefit of Pop_OS compared to Ubuntu? I mean installed drivers are great, but that was basically only one apt install command and a reboot.

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I started to use it a few years ago when it was the only distro runs flawlessly on my laptop. All other distros had various problems at the time. I think that's its killer feature, hassle free.

It's the only distro I would recommend to non tech people if they want to try out linux.

I don’t daily drive pop os but i theirs a couple quality of life improvements like slimmed down default applications, improved App Store, default support for battery profiles. Also I don’t believe they install any Snaps and instead use flatpacks when necessary. People like the theme too.

It's been a while since I used Pop_OS but it played better with setting up Nvidia proprietary drivers from the get go and that helped with getting a quick local ML dev environment set up. Their new tiling window manager also looks neat (seems close to i3wm and I'm looking forward to trying it) and even though you can change colorschemes pretty easily, I like their default colorscheme.

A lot of people like the Pop OS desktop, COSMIC; I myself haven't used it or regular GNOME enough to say which one I prefer. (System76 said they're making a new version in Rust that isn't based on GNOME, but that's probably a long way from completion.)

Ubuntu without snapd

And Nvidia drivers already set up, which you can spend a lot of time fiddling with in other distros.

and they are setup in a way which breaks compatibility with nvidia-docker, so beware of that.

Use tensorman. It's way cleaner than nvidia-docker, and isn't made by a company hostile to Linux to boot.

Yep. I also really like their extensions to GNOME.

Drivers, customizations on top of Gnome (if you prefer them), App Store, flatpak instead of snap. Plus made by an indie company rather than some massive corp if you're into that sort of thing.

Hmm, Canonical is not what I call 'massive' at ~600 employees[1]. Looks like Red Hat is almost twice that big[2], which still strikes me as pretty small?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_(company)#Employees

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hat

I think you misread the page, as it says that Red Hat has 13,400 employees, which is 22x more than 600, not "almost twice" :)

But also, both numbers are also outdated. The Canonical employee count is apparently around 500 in 2020 [0] and the Red Hat employee count is no longer public post-acquisition, but it's higher than it was in 2019.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Canonica...

Oops, you're right, that's just the Czech subsidiary - so they are massive-ish, at least compared to Canonical!

True, I was being a bit hyperbolic with "massive corp" :). Employee size isn't everything in determining how "big" an organization is, though. I really just meant that it, personally, makes me feel better to use something created by a small, scrappy team than something maintained by a multinational enterprise.

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