When I have had trouble (e.g. stuck updates, other apt woes, Bluetooth weirdness), System76's help pages have been great. If they don't cover it, I just search +Ubuntu and the advice I find almost always works.
I have no idea what WM or DE or anything I'm running, it's just here and it stays out of the way so there's no situation where I would be confronted by having to know its name. That's a bit annoying (I did finally find out that "Files" is actually "Nautilus", which helped when searching to understand some behaviors) in that it limits my ability to meaningfully search for, or change, these details, but I think if it was a big deal, I'd figure it out. It's just fine.
That I can run an OS for 5 years and not know my WM or DE, is pretty cool, IMHO.
I agree. It’s the second most irritating thing. I am glad that I have written my tiny `update` bash script, which takes care of installing all updates (apt, flatpack, brew, etc.) without touching "app store".
I believe the bundled Pop!_Shop originates from Elementary OS and suffers from issues with proper background job processing. I find all those “store” apps for GNOME to be poorly written, often displaying incorrect numbers of updates, and generally slow.
I really like it, everything mostly just works well without any hassles.
I'm keen to try out Cosmic, although I would have preferred that they had a Gnome based 24.04 release last year rather than making everything wait for it.
But I'm still a happy user. Just hope they stick to the 2 year LTS cadence in future.
I have been following Cosmic and using it quite a bit. For alpha it was great. I have been daily driving it off and on and its mostly pretty good. I would say I prefer it over vanilla Gnome.
So its my plan to keep using it, I have no intention of going to Ubuntu again.
Pop!_OS is probably the best Ubuntu/Debian derivative I've used. It's buttery smooth for everything I need it to be. I haven’t encountered any bugs or major problems that are strictly related to Pop!_OS. It feels like Ubuntu, without slow Snaps (Pop!_OS is Flatpak-centered), Canonical ads (Ubuntu Pro, MicroK8s...), and with a slightly modified GNOME desktop environment.
If I had to find the worst thing about Pop!_OS, it's a negligible issue stemming from muscle memory after using macOS. The Super+Left/Right Arrow keys on Pop!_OS are used to switch between applications, while on macOS they are meant to move the text cursor to the start or end of a word. I haven't found the option to disable it yet.
"Weary" means "very tired". I think you mean "wary" -- nervous, hesitant, scared.
"I am wary of trying a new OS..."
It is less bloated than ubuntu ( but still has heavily embedded stuff that is hard to remove like accessibility -- the amount of times kid pressed key combination to turn on voicing each key was super annoying ). Store is slow af. But all of those are smaller things.
edit: note about the store