Would love to hear people's experiences with PopOS. I remember when it was new and Cosmic looked really neat, but I'm weary to try a new OS that has fewer users, purely because bugs will be reported and fixed less, so I've been an Ubuntu (and probably a Debian, soon) user.
I've been on Pop for about 5 years, through several major upgrade cycles, and it's nearly flawless. The bundled Pop!Shop app store is the notable turd in the pool, but it's optional. It has a system restore partition (that I've never had to use), boot-the-previous-kernel (that I've used once), full-disk encryption by default, so many little things that I appreciate. Everything Just Works, on both my old Thinkpad and my new Framework.
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.
> The bundled Pop!Shop app store is the notable turd in the pool, but it's optional.
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 switched from Ubuntu shortly after they started using snap everywhere (so around 20.04?).
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 using PopOS for a long time. Its kind of like Ubuntu with some of the dumb Ubuntu stuff removed. Their PopShell for Gnome was just far, better then normal Gnome.
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.
I have been using Pop!_OS on my old Intel-based Dell laptop for over 5 years. Now, I'm alternating between my M1-powered Mac and Pop!_OS as my daily driver. Before, I used Ubuntu for over 10 years and tested various distributions.
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.
It was, for me, one of the best experiences for linux desktop. In a very practical way, it was popos that got me off of windows at home. There are some issues, but they seem to mostly revolve about me getting opinionated over what something 'should' look like ( so I occasionally try other distros ).
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.
They’ve got a decent live USB version that runs their installer if you want to try it out short-term, though obviously that doesn’t really give you a real sense of the day-to-day. One thing that really impressed me about the live distro was that it worked out of the box with the propriety nvidia drivers.
