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Comment by delegate | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: I've been hearing good things about PopOS. How realistic is it as a windows replacement ?

Is the question about Linux in general or about Pop_OS specifically? I've used it--the differences are going to increase once their new desktop environment releases, but right now it's comparable to Ubuntu except with some nice-to-haves (proprietary NVIDIA drivers are installed automatically, no software is delivered via Canonical's 'snaps' which are almost universally hated). I enjoyed it, but in my opinion, popular distros are more similar than they are different.

If you mean just replacing Windows with Linux in general: it's great, unless you need to run, say, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Excel, or Fortnite.

>t's great, unless you need to run, say, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Excel, or Fortnite.

There's no way to use Wine for Microsoft Excel?

I've never tried it, but my impression from other people is that it's unreliable and maybe doesn't even work at all for the newest versions of Microsoft Office.

I had problems with configuring wine prefix manually. Some frameworks could be downloaded / installed. With some were problems. 32 bit wine worked, but 64 bit prefix did not most of the times.

There were attempts to auto configure apps, like bottles program. This did work quite well when I used it for simple programs.

As with Linux. It takes some time to get familiar. Once you set up everything correctly, it will just work.

I used to give Linux desktop distros a shot every few years for a long time but would always get fed up with something not working or not being able to run some games. The last time I have switched back to Linux (Mint, not PopOS) was around three months ago, it's been a very pleasant experience with comparably few glitches (some that have been fixed with updates, some that I am still dealing with) and I don't have any plans going back to Windows any time soon, if ever.

I am using it for two years as daily driver on two (Lenovo) laptops, and I'm loving it so far! Most things worked out of the box and the UI is a nice balance of being adaptable if you want it, but also having sensible defaults. I keep having to bother with Windows for the sake of using a "real" Excel installation for some of my work, but Im really in love with the simplicity of just using Popos, whereas there are a thousand little spyware-annoyances whenever I boot up Windows again.

I'm using it as a daily driver now: https://hajo.me/blog/2024/07/02/the-year-of-the-linux-deskto...

Biggest issue is printer drivers, I'd say.

And that's not a PopOS issue, that's an issue with CUPS... it seems CUPS was forked by the original developer after his time with Apple.

https://openprinting.github.io/cups/

A couple years ago I wanted to try something simple for a daily driver and gave it a shot but it didn’t take long before its inadequacies became unbearable and I switched back; but they’ve been improving, so hopefully it’s much better now.

For anyone reading this site, sure. Generally public, hell no.

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