It’s an Ubuntu downstream maintained by Linux box maker System76 which is targeted for both general usability and design/media applications. They will soon be debuting their own home-spun desktop environment, Cosmic DE, which is highly anticipated by the Linux community.
How does the community here feel about this distribution and the company that has brought it to us? How do you feel about the projects that they’re working on, and their goals for the distribution moving forward?
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I wish they based it on Debian. It definitely earns my personal recommendation for default distros alongside LMDE
If a company with some resources makes a good Debian unstable based distro with a decent release cycle (could even be yearly), they’ll dominate the desktop market.
I think their current modified gnome is the best desktop that exists anywhere. Cosmic is a full desktop environment with an actual (auto) tiling window manager… a combo I think should be more common in desktops. The way they implement the tiling makes it really easy for beginners to use because you can turn it on/off by keyboard shortcut or clicking the plugin icon, and because you can just drag n drop windows to change their tiled positions (along with keyboard shortcuts if preferred). It’s hard to go back regular “window managers”.
The System76 devs have good ideas, they seem really cool, and sane! They have been a net positive for the Linux community and desktop development IMO. I am SO hyped for the new Cosmic DE!
You realise KDE’s had tiling for years, right? (Bismuth and then native)
There’s a very large gap between having tiling, and having excellent auto-tiling capabilities with intuitive shortcuts and behaviors. COSMIC’s autotiling was designed from the ground up to be just as usable with a mouse as it is with a keyboard.
Bismuth (and Krohnkite before) never worked nearly as well for me, and AFAIK are both abandoned. The built in tiling is closer to FancyTiles/tiling zones, not auto-tiling like Pop Shell. Pop Shell also has been here for “years” by that metric lol
Fair cop, a matter of definition of good enough, I guess.
Well not really because I never stuck around on KDE very long. But I’m aware you can have tiling on any DE if you want. Its about the out of box experience you get on Pop. Its also important (for me) that the tiling is done automatically, no fiddling.
I generally find it to be a family friendly sheen on top of ubuntu so I’ve been installing it for friends and family lately. I would prefer debian based but shrug. They’ll probably get there eventually.
POP is an excellent distro for a number of use cases. I can’t speak to System 76 hardware but Pop is definitely one of the good Distros. I have used it for about 5ish years to run Davinci Resolve on video editing laptops and workstations. Another use case for POP was for breaking Mac OS acclimated relatives out of their walled gardens. Relatives as old as 80 have had very little problem adjusting to it after having help installing it. Looking forward to Cosmic but I will make sure I have backups and other stuff to tinker with during the transition - was the same way during Wayland transition on my other machines.
Positives
- Davinci Resolve working with a little bit of fiddling and continues to run solidly.
- No hassle with Nvidia drivers on editing laptop.
- 4-5 years daily driver on Thinkpads (t460,13) and other older laptops (daily use)
- Gaming on Nvidia good.
- Elder folks adjust easily from Mac OS. Its basically Macbuntu for them without the complete pile of shit that is Snaps.
Negatives
- POP Shop was kinda shite. Had a few problems years ago. Wasn’t patient during upgrades or used terminal. A couple of shitty things happening recently but looking forward to testing out everything Cosmic (I have a rock solid edit station that will remain AMD on Endeavour OS to make sure I can still work).
- Name doesn’t bother me, but would be better as just POP OS
I suspect it will replace Ubuntu as the new noob distro, which is a good thing. Doesn’t run as fast on older hardware as mint w cinnamon, but that’s not a big deal. I’m hoping the new DE will improve that.
Love how feature rich it is, especially love the switch to toggle tiling windows on the desktop.
I have used it on my Lenovo X1 Extreme as my daily driver for years. Bulletproof.
I’m interested to try their Cosmic desktop later this year.
Overall, seems like a solid company, I’ve heard good things about their laptops, although I’ve never had one myself.
Pop_OS as a distro, heard generally good things about. The few times I’ve messed around with it have been fine. The folks that stick with it seem to like it.
Use it on my lenovo carbon x1 flawlessly. Love it.
I have a Gazelle 16 laptop, and was in PopOS for a while too, even before this laptop, when I had a 17" Alienware. However, I’ve moved on to Fedora now, and can’t go back to anything Ubuntu or Ubuntu based again. Fedora is just too great a balance between stable and cutting edge, Ubuntu feels old real quick, and so do all it’s derivatives and downstreams.
I loved the Gnome based Cosmic, best Tweak of Gnome ever in my opinion, but other than that, I just can’t leave Fedora behind anymore. Even Ublue distros are amazing.
Care to elaborate on what really sold you on fedora?
Also, the new cosmic DE will be available for all distros
Not OP, but my reasons for choosing Fedora is, it just works. I use the Atomic version of it which is an image based operating system. Installing packages or updates does not leave the system unstable. I can simply rollback to previous version. Also Fedora pushes entire Linux community forward by adopting potential technologies like Flatpak, PipeWire, Wayland etc earlier compared to other distros.
(I also run NixOS which I believe has more potential and solves many problems than Fedora).
Having said that there are two downsides to Fedora.
- Fedora is closely associated with Red Hat. I wish it is purely community driven.
- Fedora does not offer LTS kernels (Maybe it would threaten Red Hat, if Fedora is too stable).
First, an integral distaste for everything remotely associated with Ubuntu, on a principle as well as on a stability and usability front. As I mentioned, the best balance between stability and cutting edge tech is on Fedora and other Fedora based distros. No other come close to that balance. See some people mention DNF, but for me that’s just another packager, could not care less.
As for the atomic versions that I see many mention regularly, I’m giving them a try, even have bazzite running on my laptop right now trying to see if I can actually like it, but it’s not looking promising. Atomic versions I’ve tried seem to be slower than regular distros for boot an apps launch (work fast enough after, though). Then there’s the fact that, while they are great for “fire and forget”, that same feature makes them very convoluted to achieve some system level stuff,reqyiring morework and tinkering than with a regular distro.
First, an integral distaste for everything remotely associated with Ubuntu, on a principle as well as on a stability and usability front. As I mentioned, the best balance between stability and cutting edge tech is on Fedora and other Fedora based distros. No other come close to that balance. See some people mention DNF, but for me that’s just another packager, could not care less.
As for the atomic versions that I see many mention regularly, I’m giving them a try, even have bazzite running on my laptop right now trying to see if I can actually like it, but it’s not looking promising. Atomic versions I’ve tried seem to be slower than regular distros for boot an apps launch (work fast enough after, though). Then there’s the fact that, while they are great for “fire and forget”, that same feature makes them very convoluted to achieve some system level stuff,reqyiring morework and tinkering than with a regular distro.
I installed this on my touchscreen laptop after trying and failing to get many other distros to work with the touchscreen.
With Pop! it just worked.
Is good, I got bored though as they haven’t released a major update since 2022. On opensuse tumbleweed now.
Not having the bugs of using gnome extensions for customisations is nice.
I’m a pop_os enjoyer, the window manager is great especially on a small laptop screen. Also have it running in the living room on a media pc (streaming, light gaming, music etc) and it’s been fantastic for that application as well. Excited for the upcoming switch to cosmicDE, think that will be chef kiss for me.
Visuals were striking, but on non-System 76 hardware the thing as a whole broke several times cuz updates. Would love to try out some System76 hardware one of these days though.
Ive had good success across three non system 76 machines. It is Ubuntu under the covers. I’d expect most of it to work as well as ubuntu does.
Personally, I’ve installed it on at least a couple of dozen machines that definitely weren’t from system 76, and not one of them them had a problem.
I’m curious, what sort of issues did you have?
Simple updates brought the system down, it was long enough ago that I do not remember the exact cause but I remember the frustration lol.
I really like it. I tried several distros for my first dedicated desktop Linux machine and pop was the one that clicked. I like that it’s not trying to mimick windows UI, and only sorta behaves like macOS. Everyone else was too close to win10. Which I understand is a selling point, so to speak, but I’m so sick of windows that I wanted it to look and act differently.
I like it, I think it’s a better Ubuntu than Ubuntu is these days, if you know what I mean. And I’m really interested to see how the COSMIC desktop environment works out.
Also I really like their laptops. I want to get a Pangolin one day lol.
