A lot of people here coming from Windows and other Linux distros seem to appreciate how easy to use and out of the way is Pop OS.
And that's exactly how I'd describe my experience with Ubuntu proper.
Can someone who made the transition from Ubuntu to Pop OS tell us how big a difference there are between the two flavors?
1. It uses systemd-boot as the boot loader. I like not having a grub menu, just turn on my computer and I'm basically on the login screen. It's seamless.
2. Flathub enabled out of the box. I find Flatpaks the best experience for lots of common apps like Slack, Teams, etc. It's a nice feature.
3. Nvidia support in the ISO/out of the box. Nice experience for Nvidia GPU users.
The rest of their stuff, like the windowing features etc, I don't really get much value out of. I like Gnome so I disable most of their stuff.
1. I don't get the grub menu on any of my Ubuntu machines (except for the one I use to test stuff where many distros co-exist); I "just turn on my computer and I'm basically on the login screen. It's seamless."
2. Same. But with Snap. (I know that many people here don't like snaps for many reasons, and I do too, sometimes. But experience-wise, they're fine and comparable to Flutpaks. It's even possible to add Flathub if one's into that);
3. Installing Nvidia drivers is easy. And they're in the Ubuntu ISO since 19.10;
I like Gnome too, but I sure miss Unity so much!
For the last year I installed both Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and 21.04. Both times I had to opt out of installing proprietary drivers during installation to avoid getting a system freeze. Then, on first boot, I would open a new session before I even log in and install updates and nvidia drivers from there. Any attempts of using the GUI to install them would result to freezing. With Pop I never had to go through these loops, I just installed the Nvidia ISO and I was good to go.
I also get grub menu on startup with Ubuntu. It's like 3 or 5 seconds long but it's there, and I use EFI. But it's not a deal-breaker.
Snap is much worse at dependency sharing than Flatpak, which is surprisingly okay at it despite the container-based approach. This means that after you install your first one or two Snaps or Flatpaks, Flatpak is several times faster than Snap.
Snap has pretty atrocious download sizes and install times, plus noticeably slower app start times, even on NVMe and very fast internet. I definitely recommend directly comparing them.
(Keep both around of course, to leave whichever as a last resort for what's missing from the other.)
For those on other distros wondering about this behavior and whether they can get it: systemd-boot does support menus, and GRUB also supports bypassing the menu. Systemd-boot is quite good though. It's simpler to configure and less feature-complete than GRUB, and a great first choice for EFI setups.
One of the things I don't like about ubuntu is their updater stuff. I want to apt-get something, but can't because apparently ubuntu is updating stuff in the background...
Or sometimes these a dumb "system has detected a problem, send report?" dialog that pops up all the time.
PopOS experience is much better. I get an OS notification about available updates, and with two clicks I can decide to install them and so far, it hasn't harassed me with dumb pop-ups.
It's things like these where I find ubuntu very unpolished at times. And as I get older, I just want things to work and get out of my way.
Pop OS removes that. They also round some other UX corners and customize the desktop a bit.
Pop OS is essentially Ubuntu with a few enhancements. It is not a very different experience. I like the zero-effort, zero-config window tiling, and the 1-click disk encryption. But it's mainly like Ubuntu with a couple hours saved by delegating configuring some stuff and making a few choices to System76.
(I'm running it on a pretty standard Intel+NVIDIA+ASRock PC assembled by a local builder.)
Ubuntu I cant stand the color and icon style each time I try, pop os it feels beautiful. Almost like a macos interface.