Linux distro review: System76’s Pop _OS

I've been using a System76 Darter with Pop OS for over a year now, through, I think, four releases. Everything about the hardware and software has been wonderful. I decided to abandon Apple MBPs due to software regressing in both design and implementation, and the execrably bad hardware design decisions lately (touchbar, butterfly keyboard, greatly increased fragility to obtain marginally lighter and thinner cases).

For similar specs, the Darter was far cheaper, (and, in fact, 32GB hasn't been available on an MBP until recently). And System76 support is stellar, for both hardware and software.

I have been using Linux for 20 years now, and the System76 hardware/software combination is the best I've experienced. Wifi just works. Printing just works. Power management just works. I have not yet found myself diving down Stack Overflow and google rabbit holes trying to solve obscure configuration problems.

Apple is turning into 90s-era Microsoft and System76 is turning into early 2000s Apple. Which is terrible for Apple customers, and great for System76 customers. System76 is focusing on extremely polished hardware/sofwtare integration. Now their hardware is not in the same league as Apple's -- they resell someone's hardware. But the integration is excellent, and they are starting to design (and manufacture?) their own hardware. They'll get there.

The one thing that Apple still has over System76 is integration with all of their other devices and services. I still have an iPhone, and I still have to have an Apple computer for syncing it, and managing my iTunes media. But for day-to-day computer use, and for software development, System76 is what I use.

I installed Pop!_OS on my 2013 Mac Pro tube just over a year ago (it's my development workstation), and can't say enough great things about this distribution. The attention to detail that System76 made to the UI for developers is perfect, and I've had to do little-to-no customization.

The quickest way to love Pop!_OS is to get used to the keyboard shortcuts on day 1: https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-keyboard-shortcuts...

If someone like to use Mac OS shortcuts I highly recommend https://github.com/rbreaves/kinto

I built a new PC about a month ago, and installed it to dual-boot between Pop OS and Windows - this after almost a decade of OSX.

I had intended to make Pop OS my primary workspace, but it's now been 3 weeks since I've even loaded Linux, and have been working in Windows the entire time. The reasons for this:

1. Pop OS had issues with my graphics card. I even bought a AMD RX5600 rather than a Nvidia card due to the existence of open source drivers. Nah, no such luck. I'd get occasional crashes (which seemed to diminish once I'd updated the bios using the Windows software for the card). But that's not all: the GPU acceleration that Google Maps uses would consistently and quickly freeze the entire machine - not just Chrome, the entire machine, and only a hard reboot would get it back.

1.5 (Probably related to 1) Weird pauses of 30 seconds or more. They'd happen when opening alacritty, and also when opening Chrome. This is on a brand new, reasonably high spec desktop machine.

2. Inconsistent shortcuts drove me mad. Want to copy something from Chrome? Use Ctrl+C. But from the terminal? Then it's Ctrl+Shift+C.

3. I discovered WSL2 in Windows. It works pretty much flawlessly, is awesomely performant and tightly integrated with Windows. You get all the parts of Linux you need to develop, and none of the hassles of Linux.

I bought a Windows license for this new PC thinking I'd occasionally need it to run a game or some other software. Yet it's now my daily working system. Who would have thought?

Their Gnome theme looks like it is from 2002.