Pop_OS 21.04
blog.system76.com
blog.system76.com
I also think that the enhancements they've made with their Cosmic Desktop are indeed that - enhancements over base Gnome desktop, and they, as with most of the things have done, gone with a pragmatic approach to them. The automatic tiling is built on top of gnome rather than requiring a separate window manager (this is a much bigger feature than I think it's been given credit for). Workspaces are more prominent and there are more ways to make working with them better than on default Gnome. The launcher is also much more robust and more closely mimics spotlight search or Alfred rather than Launchpad.
I'm glad that PopOS exists and I would probably recommend it to anyone who wants to get their feet wet with linux and anyone that is curious about automatic tiling window managers - this is a great starting point with low commitment requirements.
That seems like a kind of self-contradictory philosophy - if you care more about whether it "just works" than how much control you have, how does it make sense to want to run Linux at all?
I think the OP meant in terms of if you don't want the same non OSS binaries nVidia ships you can install something else?
Personally, I don't want to be part of Microsoft's ecosystem anymore, but I want some 'convenience' because I actually need to be productive rather than forever navigating the maze of compatible driver versions, so there are a number Linux flavours that fit this middle ground quite nicely.
I use Pop_OS in preference to Ubuntu, but Ubuntu for the most convenience short of anything Microsoft.
I suspect most people, even those that are heavily invested in FOSS have some limit to that as well. I doubt that many people are auditing the code for every application or program they compile on their computer. They have a sphere of trust where they can just assume that what they're running is safe enough and that the software isn't going out of its way to be malicious. It's a matter of degrees. I happen to be okay with giving up some control for the convenience of not having to try to install wifi drivers on my computer without access to the internet.
I don't think it's self-contradictory at all. People have different ideas of what an Operating System should be and that's reflected in the number of different linux distributions all with their own ideas and philosophies. I just happen to really like what System76 has done.
And I dare say that on servers, linux certainly "just works".
The answer to this is "For almost its entire history of being used as a desktop operating system by users without a significantly above average level of technical knowledge."
I think Linux is in a pretty good state for at least the last few years but you have to be either unreasonably lucky or simply joking to be able to pretend you are unfamiliar with the concept of running into various hardware/driver/software issues attempting to run Linux as a desktop OS. Even if you stick to "Linux Certified" hardware like Thinkpads.
Linux is my OS of choice these days, but over the years I've had 10x as many issues as I have with my Windows systems and I probably have 10x as much time in raw hours using Windows.
I think perhaps something happens to those of us with experience and expertise is when we run into an issue we might know how to fix it in 30 seconds or a few minutes so it doesn't even seem like it was an issue to us, simply part of configuring the system. However, when it happens to someone that's not experienced that same "non-issue" might result in them spending 4 hours on forums and various websites trying to figure out how to do something that would only take a few seconds if they already knew how.
That's assuming they don't just throw their hands up immediately and ask someone to fix it for them.
1. Hibernation is broken in three different ways (1. it's disabled by default 2. it resumes instantly when certain hardware is plugged in 3. it only works if almost no programs run, probably because the default swap partition is too small)
2. Computer freezes when running out of memory. Still not sure how to improve this, perhaps a bigger swap partition, perhaps changing the OOM killer configuration or installing another OOM killer daemon.
3. Ran out of space on the boot partition so kernel updates won't work until I figure out how to manually fix that. Plus the last kernel it installed before complaining doesn't boot at all, so I have to manually pick an old one.
And my earlier attempts on other distributions didn't go better either. Fedora managed to corrupt its package manager state and started complaining about incorrectly signed packages. And on Ubuntu I didn't manage to switch to nvidia's driver, it kept using nouveau with no indication of what's wrong.
It most certainly works out of the box for most general tasks.
Of course there are still limitations like a lack of some software (Photoshop...) and peripherals support, but these are becoming far more uncommon. I even find with Steam's proton implementation I can install and run most Windows games without a second thought.
Which begs the question why bother with Linux then.
As for privacy and control discussion, when most GNU/Linux users happen to mostly consume Electron and Web Apps, install applications via curl | sudo sh, there is hardly anything to discuss, other than cargo cult of a false sense of privacy and control.
Pity that all that security goes away the second an Electron app or Chrome is made use of.
You're making silly arguments based on your own strawmen.
Also, you used "begs the question" incorrectly. You mean "raises the question".
Also, because Windows is a steaming pile of donkey turd that shoves ads in your OS, reboots when you're trying to get work done, resets privacy and power management settings after many of its coerced updates, and has a spazzy and inconsistent UI that offers limited customization. Also closed source.
But really, reality is that Linux support for games is still caught in the cycle of too few customers to bother -> customers want better Linux support before moving over -> too few customers to bother...
So I can now have all the (my) benefits of Linux and enjoy gaming that otherwise I wouldn't.
Debian has been really good for just about everything since I moved to it many moons ago, and as of today is still my daily driver on all machines, but sometimes requires constant fiddling here and there, and I'm getting old; I stopped recompiling my kernels on PCs over 10 years ago, and a system that works just out of the box is too temping:) Not to criticize Debian, which has been great almost everywhere, but it gave some problems with some niche applications, for example music: a working LinVST installation is not easy to obtain, and it is tightly tied with the running kernel, which if has _rt extensions will help with low latency but sometimes doesn't let one compile with standard Wine libraries, and when one finds a good compromise, bang! VirtualBox stops working because now its kernel module doesn't build anymore. Grrrr!:) So I may take the chance to test some other options, and Arch might be a good candidate.
Lately I've been using Mint-XFCE in a VM for some of my Linux needs and that's been much better performing than trying to virtualize the fancier desktop environments. But Pop_OS looks promising for next time I need a native linux environment.
And they also break on every GNOME release, often enough that I kinda' gave up on my favorite GNOME extension (Dash to Dock). Not that I blame the extension developers, but e.g. the review times on extensions.gnome.org are atrocious, and the build system is fiddly enough that I can't remember what I did to install it manually 6, 12 or 18 months earlier.
To configure your newly enabled extensions, you need to install the Gnome Extensions flatpack.
And to do that, you're off to the command line to add Flathub as a remote repo.
I don't know that the desktop icons extension requires any configuration, but based on the fact that you need an extension for it I'm guessing that there are similarly weird decisions being made elsewhere, and being able to change extension settings is going to be useful. And to get to that point you have a four stage install including a trip to the command line?
Why not ship Gnome Extensions by default with the OS? Is this like Steve Jobs with his "you're holding it wrong" remark, and people who want to put icons on the desktop are supposed to just stop wanting to do that?
I think the GNOME developers want to stop hearing about packaging issues for their apps, so they ask everyone to use the Flatpak versions. I have nothing against it, but there's no point as long as the distro-provided version still works.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/gnome-shell-inte...
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gnome-shell-integr...
> You MUST install native connector for this extension to work.
But of the ones above you mention that I’ve used in anger you’re absolutely right and that’s the very idea of them. To ‘just work’.
I prefer Tumbleweed though. Well tested rolling release (https://openbuildservice.org/), snapshots on update. With the opi package you can install: chrome, codecs, dotnet, msedge, msteams, plex, skype, signal, slack, teamviewer, vivaldi, vscode, vscodium, zoom and more. Brave is app i am missing so far, but having the newest version KDE and other software that required a PPA on Ubuntu is pretty nice.
And it feels much snappier installed on a SATA SSD than Mint from a NVME SSD on the same machine!
[edit: more info]
This is really quite disingenuous, especially coupled with the jab at Nvidia cards. In case you weren't aware, there is no option to actually make an Nvidia card useful because of their locking up of P-state modifications and re-clocking behind cryptographically signed firmware they refuse to distribute. I think you actually know this though, otherwise why would you bring up the crippled nature of Nvidia cards of post-Maxwell and later?
PopOS definitely deserves accolades, but let's not pass off Nvidia's giving the middle finger proctological exam to the FOSS community as a point that makes PopOS better. Nothing is made better by that but Nvidia's bottom line, and vendor lock-in agenda.
EDIT: I think I misunderstood, and your complaint wasn't about the quality of their proprietary drivers, rather their refusal to work with open source developers. I was reacting mainly to "no option to actually make an Nvidia card useful"
I also had to resort to looking at guides on Medium.com for installing CUDA, as the install is not as straightforward as it looks. Alternatively, you can search on DuckDuckGo (for privacy reasons) with this as the query: "NVIDIA" AND "CUDA" AND "install" site:medium.com
In the end though I’m not going to use nouveau and am one hundred percent going to install the proprietary blobs Nvidia provides because I bought a dedicated GPU for a reason. Making it so I don’t have to jump through hoops to do that is appreciated and PopOS is one of the few that will just let me skip several steps to get there.
Same with a kernel greater >= 5.10 and that particular driver series. So would be nice to hear what Pop OS is doing here that Ubuntu isn’t.
If the rumours of nvidia open sourcing their drivers are true (sorry no link - just something I heard) they’ll all work out of the box one day (hopefully !).
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller (rev 0c)
After a couple of weeks of use, so far it seems fine. Maybe the only thing I find slightly annoying is that the machines don't ship with the drives setup with LVM. Of course LVM is there if you want to use it, and that's not a slight on the OS, just the default configuration.
Anyway... consider this something of a tentative endorsement of Pop! from me. I need to use it a while longer, but so far so good.
also, a plug for system76 - used to play the whole dmesg-device-support-lottery with laptops; feels good paying a small premium to avoid this and support a company who is helping the ecosystem instead of throwing away whatever ms license fee & hours of system tweaking I'd be paying otherwise.
> Wouldn't it be easier to just not use swap . . . ?
In addition to preferences for hibernation, I'm a firm believer that there's a time and a place for swapping, and that one's system is worse off for lacking that option. I may not push my system's memory limits like I used to, but I certainly have pushed through 16GB, and don't like the idea that there wouldn't be a fallback like ZRAM or swap-space backing up the OOM daemon, which I'd rather didn't kill my processes in all but the most dire of circumstances.
Some amount of swapping will be done by the kernel, even on a 64GB machine with memory to spare, and without the time to do my research tonight, I trust that the kernel delelopers had solid arguments for implementing the behaviors behind that baseline swap usage.
You could make the argument that a swapfile will work just fine, and if you're not going for hibernation that just a few gigs is all you need. Live the flexibility of swap files. I wonder if you could put that behind an encrypted block device within another filesystem, ecryptfs-style.
I've been using a proper swap partition (just a hair larger than RAM, for hibernation) since the late oughts, and, ZRAM aside, am well-and-truely stuck in my ways.
Probably nothing that you can't do, but I bought a machine with lots of storage space, spread over three physical devices, and I'm just accustomed to using LVM to manage things. It's not exactly a "Big Deal" or anything. Just something that jumped out to me based on my pre-existing biases.
I was installing alongside Win 10 and it totally borked my bootloader, this in itself took me quite a long time to repair.
The steam installer worked well, but I couldn't move my library to a secondary HDD. So some Googling shows I need to install from apt instead of from the PopOS store. Which I do, but then I also had to do some more Google FU to figure out how to get PopOS to mount the secondary HDDs in a useful way.
As it is now, about a quarter of the applications I need are in the PopOS store. VLC for example isn't. So while the store is setup nice it is only marginally useful.
Finally, switching audio between wired headphones, Bluetooth headphones, and my HDMI monitor has been a nightmare.
Does it run well and is it stable once I'm up and running? Yes. But the devil is in the details. I really want to like Linux, and I am enjoying the lack of forced ads on PopOS compared to Windows, but how is widespread adoption of Linux supposed to happen when this is the onboarding process?
I'm a die hard i3 user and if there's a better tiling window manager I would switch. Can you hide all window chrome like titlebar, borders, etc to maximize pixels? How about managing window container groups? Can you cycle between different layouts, eg tabbed, split, stacked like in i3. Can you move windows to a specific desktop/monitor with keyboard? Is auto splitting and arrangement supported like bspwm or i3?
I've tried all tiling window managers and I settled on i3.
However, it has an on and off button right in the top bar. And it has a couple click way to add a window as an exception. So you can have all your terminals, browsers, etc. tiled and perfect... but when a random little tool, dialog, etc. smashes in and ruins and everything it's easy to make it float above as an exception. And if that isn't working you just flip it off and deal with the annoying program, then flip it back on.
I like it a lot. I don't come from a background of i3 or power usage of tiling WMs (to be honest I really loved paper WM, another cool gnome tiling-like extension). But pop's tiling manager seems like the perfect balance of good for users that want tiling but don't want to go all in on it.
Are you talking about their laptops?
Anyway, last I used fractional scaling (this is GNOME built-in), I ended up giving up because it just refused to work properly. I have a ultra wide 4k screen, plus my laptop screen. I really wanted to have my laptop screen at 4k when plugged in with 2x scaling, and the ultra wide 4k with 1x scaling, but it caused more trouble than it was worth. So I eventually gave up. Fractional scaling was an experimental feature when I used it, around 12 months ago, so it could have improved.
Steam and a handful of games have been the only issues. Otherwise it looks better than windows.
Full HD matte seems quite unsharp compared to the Full HD (or 4K) glossy. But with my eyes, I don't really see the difference between Full HD glossy and 4K glossy.
Matte screen by its nature desharpens so it should be expected. But I did not expect the effect to be so noticeable.
Glossy/matte is also not a binary choice, as I understand there are displays with various degrees of glosiness/matte which might provide better trade off.
After trying vanilla i3 and Pop_OS before in the past, the inertia of years of using floating windows keeps me going back to known territory (Linux Mint). Also I don't have time to tinker with settings, so I need a well thought out set of defaults.
Guess this is a good place to ask! Have you used Regolith and/or Pop_OS? Comments about how the implementations are in each one? Good/bad experiences with them?
I was already pretty comfortable with tiling window managers, and everything was easy & usable for me out of the box, but I did spend a little bit of extra time tweaking it further to get i3 to act just as I wanted it to. Still, moving to an OS where the tiling WM was properly integrated & supported everywhere OOTB was a dramatic improvement overall.
It works great so far, all very slick, I'm very happy with it.
Regolith, even though it comes with in much saner defaults and basic system tools than plain i3, still requires you to deal with low-level config files for many common things.
Pop just feels like Ubuntu with tiling window management added, which isn't a bad thing. Thing just work even more often and there's some intangible eye candy feeling to using it which is nice.
It's definitely not as robust in my experience; there's bugs I run into pretty often (lock screen will sometimes hang, dragging a tiled window to a new position will sometimes fail to update other tiled windows so you have overlapping windows or unused space).
Still, overall it's a pleasant experience and these things don't bother me as much as having to figure out why my wifi or audio devices aren't working every other week. I'm on Pop_OS 20.04 for the LTS, so maybe these have been fixed in more recent versions.
Doing a native encrypted ZFS root system, including ZFSBootMenu style boot system. They control the firmware so they could allow you to set up remote attestation or using local security keys to do the boot.
I think that would really put them over the top.
Perception of the distro's overall quality would reach the moon.
I have a brand new Lenovo Legion 5 with AMD Ryzen, Nvidia 1660Ti. This is definitely not a new hardware nor it has some strange spec. Standard, rather low end stuff for about $1000.
I've just installed Ubuntu 21.04 (the newest non LTS version) on it. LTS version cannot be used as touchpad will not work, as newer kernel is needed.
I decided to burn ISO on DVD and run installation from USB external drive. Installation started to work, but the drive was working like crazy, after 15 minutes of continuous squeaking I've stopped install and read the Internet. It turned out that installer is doing some "checks" and they take such long time that there is some timeout and it install is started again and again (obviously no clear information about what happened, only some cryptic warning info).
Lesson learned: it is virtually impossible to install Ubuntu from CD (at least external one).
Ok, I've burned ISO on USB drive.
Installation worked ok, but it turned out that screen brightness is set to max value and there is no way to change it - keyboard switches changes are ignored, software switcher is also ignored.
Reading internet again. It seems some more people had such issues, no definite recipe how to fix this: some people were changing Nvidia drivers (I did that and it did not help, whatever I used and I've tried all of them), some people were updating to newest kernel (also did that and still no luck).
I thought that laptop is broken, but there is some little software called brightness-controller that seems to work (but when I start youtube video, my brightness settings are reset back to max again...). This somehow mitigate issue, but after restart I have to adjust brightness.
Next. Bluetooth. I go to settings, turn it on, GUI shows it is turned on, but it is not. When I move to other settings and back to BT settigns I see it is disabled. So enabling is not working, no error message, no information that something is not working.
Ok, trying to do this from command line. It seems there is some software called rfkill that blocks BT and you need to run rfkill unblock bluetooth to have BT on. WTF???
So, if someone thinks that Linux is working on desktop I have a bad news. It is not. Maybe if you have some 10 years old Intel laptop with graphic card on board, maybe if you install LTS version on Ubuntu or maybe if you install that newest PopOS then you can be lucky.
No issues whatsoever. Even this random cheap bluetooth dongle I use works without a hassle.
Surprised Lenovo get it so wrong here when ThinkPads have always worked pretty well.
>This is definitely not a new hardware nor it has some strange spec
I don't think this statement applies at all for laptops. The things in the laptop that are randomly crap to work with aren't gonna be CPU or GPU, they're gonna be brightness controllers, fan controllers, extra buttons...
This is not what a competent platform looks like.
That said, other things like Steam (for example, playing games like Witcher 3 on Proton) still seems flawless, which is always nice. Overall, tentatively pleased, and a little curious what little improvements I'll end up finding and appreciating over the next couple of weeks.
I just wish they'd make their style a bit more mainstream. The whole "Pop!" branding puts me off. It's too deliberately 'quirky' but doesn't inspire me much confidence that it'll stay around.
I am sort-of locked into Apple's little walled garden because I am mostly retired, and my iPad Pro, iPhone, and Apple Watch comprise most of my device use, and macOS integrates nicely with all three.
That said, System76 and Pop_OS are great, and I value the experience and freedom of my System76 laptop. I strongly recommend them.
I once had steam working fine in ubuntu, but that was after hours of installing stuff and rebooting to see if it worked. This was especially for getting my GPU to work properly. With Pop it just works.
on pop, super + right click and drag lets you resize when your cursor is in any corner of a window, and the same but with a left click lets you move a window even if your cursor is at the bottom of a window. it makes it so quick and easy to arrange windows that ive never bothered with pop's tiling manager.
it was a long time that i tried elementary though so they may have added that feature by now
I've been using PopOS as my main work OS (I'm a web developer) on a Thinkpad T480 for more than a year now and I'm super happy with it.
At least distros like NixOS have fundamentally different architectures.
Edit: also JunOS, the other ios, WatchOS...
the UX is oppressive and huge, it feels slow, it feels heavy it's everything i hate about macOS without the things i like about macOS
XFCE is a much better choice, it's the definition of a desktop OS, lightweight and slim, pair it with [1] and you get a windows like experience
Either way, it's 2 months late and 4 months until October's release, so not really ridiculous or anything.