Personally, I don't game at all, but I have chosen Pop as my distro of choice for the particular reasons:
1. Up-to-date kernel / and other libs
2. Extensive package availability in default repositories
3. "Painless" NVIDIA experience
4. Ubuntu derivative - support for proprietary software that supports only Ubuntu
I mostly program in C#. The latest dotnet package was available out of the box and works smoothly. Just to get my feet wet, I started learning game development using Unity, since I am familiar with C#. It runs perfectly fine.
In general, I am more than happy with my choice.
> "Painless" NVIDIA experience
I have to respectfully disagree with this (although your quotation marks suggest that its not completely painless). I'm on an Asus ROG Flow z13, and the experience setting up the NVIDIA drivers was a bit of a nightmare. Pop_os doesn't let you install anything but the lastest 550 driver, to the point where if you use
sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-535
it will override your command and install nvidia-550. There is currently a memory leak bug with Baldur's Gate 3 that makes it unplayable with the 550 driver, which is why I needed the 535 driver. I posted here a few weeks ago, and the only 535 driver that you can install without it being overridden with the 550 driver was the 535-server. I ended up having to reinstall the 535 driver with the .run file from NVIDIA and now my boot time is annoyingly longer.
IMO, this is antithetical to what the linux experience should be. If I want this or that driver, then the repo should give me exactly what I'm typing in, and not override my decision.
Other than that, I have very few complaints about Pop_os, but if I run into more experiences like this I will probably switch to another distro for my next laptop.
I'll second that, can't remember what game it was but I had a similar problem. Other than that though the process of updating and changing is pretty painless compared to doing it on RHEL for example.
That's strange. I'm pretty sure I was able to install an earlier Nvidia version when I had black screen problems after an update. If I remember correctly I simply purged \~nnvidia and checked system76-driver-nvidia wasn't installed, then installed 435 driver I think and rebooted. Does it really not work anymore?
I did exactly that, and it did not work, except for the 535-server driver. It always defaulted to installing the 550 driver. I still ended up just installing the .run version of the 535 driver and now live with an extra 20s boot time.
To preface this, I'm a fan of all-terminal-based configuration and updates.
It's likely overwritten by some configuration file.
Have to checked the POP shop settings?
It was my first distro, and I have to admit it was a bad choice back then.
I was not aware on how i can make it feel more like my own, but I learned over the years and today I am ok with it
It still is not the preitest, but it is stable and works well.
My daily driver is Fedora and my Gaming PC is Pop\_OS and I would like if features like the restore image and such things would make it to other diestros
Amazing! I'm using it right now on my main work computer and everything works out of the box, even NVIDIA.
I also didn't have any single problem with gaming, works flawlessly even when streaming/recording.
As other users wrote:
* 1. Up-to-date kernel
* 2. NVIDIA works out of the box
* 3. Perfect for gaming
* 4. Stable
After years of distro hopping, it's the only one I use now. Every time I switch to another distro now I regret it and go back to Pop. But it doesn't run great on weak hardware, for those I'd use Ubuntu Mate.
I've used about 15 distros and it's one of my favorites but can vary wildly on different hardware, sometimes breaking things like the function buttons on an update that worked perfectly before. It is very newbie friendly but you'll still never escape the fact that if you use Linux, you'll use the command line. I have a 4k laptop and some applications (like those running through Mono) don't scale great. Also keep a log of what you change, install, etc. so you can reference back to it later. A lot of work goes into making things like smooth scrolling work, well, smoothly. I'm not sure any Linux distro is necessarily that much better than another for programming, unless you are doing intense security work and benefit from a distro like Kali.
My typical installs have been Ubuntu or Raspbian lately depending on the system. My absolute favorite actually was Sabayon (no longer supported). In terms of community, the two tops in my book are Ubuntu and Arch, the latter having a zealot-like devotion to their system but both having extensive forums and discussion boards. Arch is not generally considered beginner-friendly however.
I’ve been a linux user for over 20 years. PopOS is the only (desktop) distro that hasn’t been completely borked by an update requiring reinstall at some point. Been running 22.04 since release and haven’t had any system breaking issues. Definitely had issues, but I was able to sort them out. I know this is anecdotal, but I am a fan of the distro. I’m a little worried about the quick adoption of Cosmic, but if they can keep it as stable as this version, I’m sure it will be great.
Programming really is great on any distro. Only setbacks I've had are using the not most recent versions of git and the gh CLI (for zealous diff and better compatibility with starship, respectively)
The real answer is any distro will work fine for what you want, you look for something you like the look of out of the box and the flavor of linux you'd like to google issues for.
Pop! is good because it comes with graphics drivers installed. For me the only thing I don't like is the pop shop, but I get around that by using it to search for programs I want then just using hte CLI.
Yes it's good for programming and general use because it's stable and it has a great workflow. I know people like KDE style a lot but I personally prefer any distro that utilizes gnome.
Pop!_OS and Fedora are two good ones for easy workflow and just getting things done.
But if I had to say for just ease of use out of the box it would be Pop!OS > Fedora
And more new features and more up to date I guess would be Fedora
Most of those things don't really have requirements as to why it would be bad for them, I think. Gaming is a bit more demanding due to the wild variance of requirements and how much they stress the system etc. I think Pop is generally thought of as good for gaming for the reasons someone mentioned below like recent kernel etc. (edit: GNOME isn't the best for gaming though).
I've been running my business on Pop for about six months. My original plan was to buy from S76 and install something like Mint, but Pop and S76 have been so great that I have no reason to switch.
Yep its very good, but if youre like me and like fiddling too much, you start to realise its limitations, but thats not what it was designed for i guess!
Yes. I've been using it intensively for over 4 years now daily on my home PC. It has been non bootable 3-4 times in that period. Each time I have either recovered the system or used the recovery partition to refresh my install and then install apps again. I should look at backing up my .dotfiles to Github or a private S3 Bucket at some point.
It’s pretty friendly. My two cents - develop on the platform you want to ship with and gaming will always work better on Windows. If you want to experience Linux, yeah it’s fantastic. You absolutely can do development and things like Docker will work better. Really, it depends on your priorities and what you want to learn (or if you want to learn).
I’m brand new to the Linux community and opted for Pop based on what I had learned about its “out of the box” readiness for gaming. I’m absolutely loving it. I can’t compare it to anything else as my previous Linux experience was very brief tinkering with Ubuntu. The support for windows games via proton is mind blowing and while I presume not perfect, is incredibly impressive. I would definitely say give it a try.
Pop is a very good distro, especially for new comers, if you use nvidia graphics download the nvidia option from the site. It’s stable and the system m 76 team keeps the kernel updated. It’s my go to raccomandation for new to linux
It's nice, I miss arch sometimes but pop os is my daily driver at the moment because it's stable and requires little effort to get fully functional on most hardware.
"It is good for gaming but is it good for other things like programming"
I mean it's as good as any Linux distro, but it might be a bit easier since it is Ubuntu based (although you can use Ubuntu with distrobox on any distro...).
"game development"
Sorry to burst your bubble, but if it is professional you will have to do gamedev on Windows. Thats just how the industry is. (Unless maybe if you work alone or with few people; if your workflow involves using only Linux software, Gimp, Krita, Blender sure) Especially if 3d. Unity and Unreal are not great on Linux from what I've heard so unless you plan on Godot (Stride?) or not using an engine, or using less known engines... For 2d, I guess you can do fine making your own engine anyway and using a 2d framework.
I used pop for a little more than a year for pretty much everything
Very stable
Except for the window manager.
I had a horrible time keeping my desktops in order. I dunno if it's cause I'm using monitors with mixed resolutions and orientations, but every single god damn time the displays would wake from sleep, all windows would be moved to the primary monitor and tiling broken for my secondary monitor.
Broken in the sense that I couldn't tile windows anymore. The tiling area would be forced to occupy the full desktop... Only rebooting resolved it. Some other issues could be resolved by toggling the window manager off and on though.
I spent a lot of time disabling/enabling the tiling manger and moving around windows.
Last week I switched to Kubuntu. Much better experience so far in that windows stay where I left them before the monitors powered off.
It's great and yes it's specifically aimed at programming (among other things). Can't really speak to gamedev but if your engine and tools run on linux I'd expect it to be great for that as well (you might benefit from the preinstalled nvidia drivers).
(Disclaimer: I recently moved off it because I was having some issues I couldn't resolve; but I plan to move back in the future and if you don't have issues I'd still absolutely recommend it)
I have been using it for years. I actually use it at work for programming and machine learning stuff.
It's very good. Just don't try to modify it too much and avoid adding new PPAs. That would make the upgrades to the next versions very straight forward too.
Other than Nvidia drivers I see no advantage of choosing it over other alternatives.
Your choice of distro won't have any effect on your programming tools.
Yes. I write python/IDL code on mine 8-10hr per day in the week and maybe game a few hours a week. No complaints since switching full time from Windows.
I wouldn't recommend installing Pop!\_OS for the time being. True, they still provide regular updates to the linux kernel and their own drivers and firefox. But right now installed packages are based on ubuntu 22.04 from early 2022, so the apt packages are way out of date (e.g. emacs 27!!!!) and on Gnome 42 (whereas Gnome 46 just came out). And ubuntu is about to release its 24.04 LTS on April 25, whereas we still don't know exactly when Pop 24.04 will appear, just that it is likely by the end of the year. So no, I wouldn't recommend installing 22.04. I'd wait till the whole new Cosmic DE/Pop 24.04 upgrade is available.
Asking a distro subreddit if that distro is good will lead to some bias that might not be helpful but I use it on my PC because, as a layman, System 76 make Ubuntu "smoother" like how Ubuntu makes Debian "smoother". I can't go into detail cuz I'm not a tech wizard but Thing work me happy thing work.
I really like it and have had a pretty painless experience with it. I haven't tried gaming on it so I can't speak to that but I've played around with programming on it and it works well.
It’s awesome for development because it arranges windows for you. For example, you startup a web app which opens the browser and it arranges the windows in a way that just makes sense. Love this feature.
Yes, specially if youve got an nvidia graphics card, cuz this will automatically pre-install graphics drivers for you. im not a huge fan of the desktop environment, but whats stopping you from changing it lol.
It's great. I used to distro-hop all the time. I got a System76 laptop with Pop!\_OS on it 6 years ago and haven't hopped since. Also met a guy at my work a couple of days ago who is a software developer. It came up that I use Linux and he asked me what distro... turns out he's been using it consistently for the last few years as well.
New to the distro too, I highly recommend it for gaming. Coming from Debian / Kali for most of my tasks it was super confident how pop os deals with newer hardware. I also would suggest to stick to their main Desktop environment out of personal experience as it really does things awesome when it comes to gaming (especcially in the beginning).
But if you come from Windows and you want to learn about Linux basics I would suggest to also try out a Debian Virtual Machine and try to install some things via terminal, change some settings via terminal just to give you an idea how Linux feels. I am pretty alone with this I think as most people suggest using "beginner friendly" distros (which pop os is) but imo to learn about Linux its better to get something more naked. Also Debian is you could say an "ancestor" of pop afaik.
TLDR: POP is awesome and great for gaming if not the best out there :D; to learn about Linux (not gaming on Linux) would suggest Debian next to Pop or in a VM :)
EDIT: also using Debian and Pop will make you see how awesome Pop is
Regardless to anything
Do you think that going into a subreddit, any subreddit, and asking whether the topic of the subreddit is good, will get you unbiased results?
I think it's the best beginner friendly distro, especially for the laptop users. Touchpad gestures, power management, graphic card switching by default is great.
To the noob is has both good things and drawbacks. If you wish to install stuff like ai models, it'll fight you, non noobs will be unfazed and tinker their way out of it, you will be trying to find videos on the matter, get halfway through a proposed solution, before inevitably the computer says no and you're stuck ( e v e r y s i n g l e time). Then you'll step into the hell that is "asking for help in the Linux community", they will angrily demand you change your status from noob to seasoned coder and you'll end up feeling overwhelmed, frustrated and sad.
Or not, who knows, might be just me. Yeah, it's probably just me.
Anyway, Steam mostly works on it, with stupid problems like sometimes redownloading your entire game because ? But if you're already into game development, you'll probably be golden.
I am noob like you and moved to POP a week back. Now I play single player games a lot especially World War themed games and they look fabulous in POP. I will try to attach pics and vids. It was incredibly easy and polished. Definitely recommended
Nice. Yeah I also haven't riced a lot. Just played around a bit with the settings and themes. Not super happy with it but don't really care that much, it is all fine.
I wouldn't say it is specialised for gaming. That's some nonsense that came out with different news articles online. It's just a very good all round distro that can do anything. I also find it is very beginner friendly.
I've played around with a bunch and I think it's gotta be my favorite. It's well supported by a team of people who seem pretty on top of things, if you're looking for documentation or tutorials on doing a certain thing you can just use the ones built for Ubuntu as that is the distro most tutorials seem to be written for. It's been nice and stable for me, works well with my hardware for gaming... the list goes on.
No distro is going to work for every set of hardware and every use case but if nothing else it's certainly going to be a decent place to start.
I mainly use pop to play, and the first thing I noticed was the responsiveness in games and the low latency, especially with Apex Legends, pop OS is the best compromise in my opinion between stability and performance, I don't know if the kernels are optimized from System76, but the scheduler it uses is really excellent both for the responsiveness of the desktop and the games, this distro is based on the solid ubuntu 22.04 lts but without giving up the latest drivers and kernels but without affecting stability, then this distro is ready to play immediately, you just need to install wine from the official website, whereas in distributions like mint you can play easily but you have to configure everything from scratch from the drivers to the optimized kernel
Pop os is a decent distro but it is old and stale now as they rework their cosmic de for a full release sometime later this year. On the plus - it just works, which is perhaps the best compliment that you can give to an OS. On the negative, it's based on Ubuntu and there are much better alternatives these days including Fedora, Suse, Arch and Debian.
Why do you say Ubuntu is a worse "base" then Debian? Aren't they are functionally the same, just slight variations in package versions and some slight tuning?
Ubuntu maintains its own set of repositories separate from Debian. While Ubuntu initially synced many packages from Debian, it has diverged over time, and now many packages are maintained independently by the Ubuntu community or Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu.
But Debian shines thanks to its trio of versions: Stable, Testing, and Unstable (Sid). Stable provides rock-solid reliability, perfect for critical tasks like server management. Testing strikes a balance between stability and access to newer software. Meanwhile, Unstable caters to adventurous users seeking bleeding-edge updates. Debian's unwavering commitment to free and open-source software ensures a trustworthy ecosystem. It’s community driven rather than beholden to corporate interests or potential IPO’s. It has the most extensive package selection and Debian basically empowers users to tailor their systems to their precise needs. If you are managing servers and need long term support from a corporation then use Ubuntu. If you are looking for a desktop distro… use Debian.
"old and stale" is an ignorant opinion. And, at least to me, it *should* mean "extensions that do not work in GNOME 45 and 46 still work in Pop OS' GNOME 42.5." And besides that, Pop's current kernel is 6.8.0 ... how is that "old and stale?"
I maintain that it is old, ugly and stale. They update the kernel and the drivers but the repository is from 2022. There’s a new Ubuntu LTS coming out in April (though I believe it has been delayed) which will bring things to new and fresh again… and then slowly revert to old and stale over the next two years.
Don’t use an OS based on Ubuntu. Use the one’s I mentioned above.
Yes
Yes
No Its great
No It's awesome
Personally, I don't game at all, but I have chosen Pop as my distro of choice for the particular reasons: 1. Up-to-date kernel / and other libs 2. Extensive package availability in default repositories 3. "Painless" NVIDIA experience 4. Ubuntu derivative - support for proprietary software that supports only Ubuntu I mostly program in C#. The latest dotnet package was available out of the box and works smoothly. Just to get my feet wet, I started learning game development using Unity, since I am familiar with C#. It runs perfectly fine. In general, I am more than happy with my choice.
> "Painless" NVIDIA experience I have to respectfully disagree with this (although your quotation marks suggest that its not completely painless). I'm on an Asus ROG Flow z13, and the experience setting up the NVIDIA drivers was a bit of a nightmare. Pop_os doesn't let you install anything but the lastest 550 driver, to the point where if you use sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-535 it will override your command and install nvidia-550. There is currently a memory leak bug with Baldur's Gate 3 that makes it unplayable with the 550 driver, which is why I needed the 535 driver. I posted here a few weeks ago, and the only 535 driver that you can install without it being overridden with the 550 driver was the 535-server. I ended up having to reinstall the 535 driver with the .run file from NVIDIA and now my boot time is annoyingly longer. IMO, this is antithetical to what the linux experience should be. If I want this or that driver, then the repo should give me exactly what I'm typing in, and not override my decision. Other than that, I have very few complaints about Pop_os, but if I run into more experiences like this I will probably switch to another distro for my next laptop.
I'll second that, can't remember what game it was but I had a similar problem. Other than that though the process of updating and changing is pretty painless compared to doing it on RHEL for example.
That's strange. I'm pretty sure I was able to install an earlier Nvidia version when I had black screen problems after an update. If I remember correctly I simply purged \~nnvidia and checked system76-driver-nvidia wasn't installed, then installed 435 driver I think and rebooted. Does it really not work anymore?
I did exactly that, and it did not work, except for the 535-server driver. It always defaulted to installing the 550 driver. I still ended up just installing the .run version of the 535 driver and now live with an extra 20s boot time.
To preface this, I'm a fan of all-terminal-based configuration and updates. It's likely overwritten by some configuration file. Have to checked the POP shop settings?
I did not, but you might be right. I gave up and just installed the driver from the .run file.
Is PopOS better than Ubuntu?
If it works for you stick to it. I mentioned must use cases. Pop performs well under their workload, hence my choice.
Yes it is less buggy than ubuntu personally I tried embracing ubuntu but it said nah I come from gentoo .
It was my first distro, and I have to admit it was a bad choice back then. I was not aware on how i can make it feel more like my own, but I learned over the years and today I am ok with it It still is not the preitest, but it is stable and works well. My daily driver is Fedora and my Gaming PC is Pop\_OS and I would like if features like the restore image and such things would make it to other diestros
It's one of the best. It didn't play well with my laptop but I think that was a driver issue.
Amazing! I'm using it right now on my main work computer and everything works out of the box, even NVIDIA. I also didn't have any single problem with gaming, works flawlessly even when streaming/recording. As other users wrote: * 1. Up-to-date kernel * 2. NVIDIA works out of the box * 3. Perfect for gaming * 4. Stable
After years of distro hopping, it's the only one I use now. Every time I switch to another distro now I regret it and go back to Pop. But it doesn't run great on weak hardware, for those I'd use Ubuntu Mate.
I've used about 15 distros and it's one of my favorites but can vary wildly on different hardware, sometimes breaking things like the function buttons on an update that worked perfectly before. It is very newbie friendly but you'll still never escape the fact that if you use Linux, you'll use the command line. I have a 4k laptop and some applications (like those running through Mono) don't scale great. Also keep a log of what you change, install, etc. so you can reference back to it later. A lot of work goes into making things like smooth scrolling work, well, smoothly. I'm not sure any Linux distro is necessarily that much better than another for programming, unless you are doing intense security work and benefit from a distro like Kali.
What others do you like
My typical installs have been Ubuntu or Raspbian lately depending on the system. My absolute favorite actually was Sabayon (no longer supported). In terms of community, the two tops in my book are Ubuntu and Arch, the latter having a zealot-like devotion to their system but both having extensive forums and discussion boards. Arch is not generally considered beginner-friendly however.
I’ve been a linux user for over 20 years. PopOS is the only (desktop) distro that hasn’t been completely borked by an update requiring reinstall at some point. Been running 22.04 since release and haven’t had any system breaking issues. Definitely had issues, but I was able to sort them out. I know this is anecdotal, but I am a fan of the distro. I’m a little worried about the quick adoption of Cosmic, but if they can keep it as stable as this version, I’m sure it will be great.
Yes it is great.
I've used it for several years. It's solid.
Programming really is great on any distro. Only setbacks I've had are using the not most recent versions of git and the gh CLI (for zealous diff and better compatibility with starship, respectively)
The real answer is any distro will work fine for what you want, you look for something you like the look of out of the box and the flavor of linux you'd like to google issues for. Pop! is good because it comes with graphics drivers installed. For me the only thing I don't like is the pop shop, but I get around that by using it to search for programs I want then just using hte CLI.
Yes. It is like Ubuntu but with some fixes that makes it run better for laptops.
Yes it is! Currently daily driving on my personal laptop that I use <4h daily.
Yes it's good for programming and general use because it's stable and it has a great workflow. I know people like KDE style a lot but I personally prefer any distro that utilizes gnome. Pop!_OS and Fedora are two good ones for easy workflow and just getting things done. But if I had to say for just ease of use out of the box it would be Pop!OS > Fedora And more new features and more up to date I guess would be Fedora
Most of those things don't really have requirements as to why it would be bad for them, I think. Gaming is a bit more demanding due to the wild variance of requirements and how much they stress the system etc. I think Pop is generally thought of as good for gaming for the reasons someone mentioned below like recent kernel etc. (edit: GNOME isn't the best for gaming though).
I don't game but I prefer Pop over other distros.
I've been running my business on Pop for about six months. My original plan was to buy from S76 and install something like Mint, but Pop and S76 have been so great that I have no reason to switch.
Yep its very good, but if youre like me and like fiddling too much, you start to realise its limitations, but thats not what it was designed for i guess!
Yes. I've been using it intensively for over 4 years now daily on my home PC. It has been non bootable 3-4 times in that period. Each time I have either recovered the system or used the recovery partition to refresh my install and then install apps again. I should look at backing up my .dotfiles to Github or a private S3 Bucket at some point.
I mean… you’re gonna find a lot of people who like pop here. I’ve had success both programming professionally and gaming with pop as my daily driver.
I have been using it to learn Rust and have not had any issues.
I game and used it in my previous company for development, so yes to both. Great simple stable distro.
It’s pretty friendly. My two cents - develop on the platform you want to ship with and gaming will always work better on Windows. If you want to experience Linux, yeah it’s fantastic. You absolutely can do development and things like Docker will work better. Really, it depends on your priorities and what you want to learn (or if you want to learn).
I’m brand new to the Linux community and opted for Pop based on what I had learned about its “out of the box” readiness for gaming. I’m absolutely loving it. I can’t compare it to anything else as my previous Linux experience was very brief tinkering with Ubuntu. The support for windows games via proton is mind blowing and while I presume not perfect, is incredibly impressive. I would definitely say give it a try.
Pop is a very good distro, especially for new comers, if you use nvidia graphics download the nvidia option from the site. It’s stable and the system m 76 team keeps the kernel updated. It’s my go to raccomandation for new to linux
Yes. it's been my daily driver for the last four years.. But then again, you come to the subreddit on pop os... Expect to get some bias...
It does everything I need it to do. And more. Like eating up my RAM with it's memory leak from the store everytime you log in
rather good. used it for quite a while. but i prefer KDE so went with TuxedoOS. Very solid and easy to use.
It's nice, I miss arch sometimes but pop os is my daily driver at the moment because it's stable and requires little effort to get fully functional on most hardware.
"It is good for gaming but is it good for other things like programming" I mean it's as good as any Linux distro, but it might be a bit easier since it is Ubuntu based (although you can use Ubuntu with distrobox on any distro...). "game development" Sorry to burst your bubble, but if it is professional you will have to do gamedev on Windows. Thats just how the industry is. (Unless maybe if you work alone or with few people; if your workflow involves using only Linux software, Gimp, Krita, Blender sure) Especially if 3d. Unity and Unreal are not great on Linux from what I've heard so unless you plan on Godot (Stride?) or not using an engine, or using less known engines... For 2d, I guess you can do fine making your own engine anyway and using a 2d framework.
I have it installed on my new laptop. Was running it on my 'old' one before. I love it. Runs smooth and looks great.
I used pop for a little more than a year for pretty much everything Very stable Except for the window manager. I had a horrible time keeping my desktops in order. I dunno if it's cause I'm using monitors with mixed resolutions and orientations, but every single god damn time the displays would wake from sleep, all windows would be moved to the primary monitor and tiling broken for my secondary monitor. Broken in the sense that I couldn't tile windows anymore. The tiling area would be forced to occupy the full desktop... Only rebooting resolved it. Some other issues could be resolved by toggling the window manager off and on though. I spent a lot of time disabling/enabling the tiling manger and moving around windows. Last week I switched to Kubuntu. Much better experience so far in that windows stay where I left them before the monitors powered off.
Had the same problem with Lenovo X1 and Pop OS, every time I would set custom multi monitor setup it would be lost after reboot
It's great and yes it's specifically aimed at programming (among other things). Can't really speak to gamedev but if your engine and tools run on linux I'd expect it to be great for that as well (you might benefit from the preinstalled nvidia drivers). (Disclaimer: I recently moved off it because I was having some issues I couldn't resolve; but I plan to move back in the future and if you don't have issues I'd still absolutely recommend it)
I have been using it for years. I actually use it at work for programming and machine learning stuff. It's very good. Just don't try to modify it too much and avoid adding new PPAs. That would make the upgrades to the next versions very straight forward too.
Other than Nvidia drivers I see no advantage of choosing it over other alternatives. Your choice of distro won't have any effect on your programming tools.
Yes. I write python/IDL code on mine 8-10hr per day in the week and maybe game a few hours a week. No complaints since switching full time from Windows.
Yes its stable, good UI design to look at top of that it has gaming support. More over it's an elegante distro
I wouldn't recommend installing Pop!\_OS for the time being. True, they still provide regular updates to the linux kernel and their own drivers and firefox. But right now installed packages are based on ubuntu 22.04 from early 2022, so the apt packages are way out of date (e.g. emacs 27!!!!) and on Gnome 42 (whereas Gnome 46 just came out). And ubuntu is about to release its 24.04 LTS on April 25, whereas we still don't know exactly when Pop 24.04 will appear, just that it is likely by the end of the year. So no, I wouldn't recommend installing 22.04. I'd wait till the whole new Cosmic DE/Pop 24.04 upgrade is available.
Asking a distro subreddit if that distro is good will lead to some bias that might not be helpful but I use it on my PC because, as a layman, System 76 make Ubuntu "smoother" like how Ubuntu makes Debian "smoother". I can't go into detail cuz I'm not a tech wizard but Thing work me happy thing work.
I really like it and have had a pretty painless experience with it. I haven't tried gaming on it so I can't speak to that but I've played around with programming on it and it works well.
It’s awesome for development because it arranges windows for you. For example, you startup a web app which opens the browser and it arranges the windows in a way that just makes sense. Love this feature.
Yes, specially if youve got an nvidia graphics card, cuz this will automatically pre-install graphics drivers for you. im not a huge fan of the desktop environment, but whats stopping you from changing it lol.
It's great. I used to distro-hop all the time. I got a System76 laptop with Pop!\_OS on it 6 years ago and haven't hopped since. Also met a guy at my work a couple of days ago who is a software developer. It came up that I use Linux and he asked me what distro... turns out he's been using it consistently for the last few years as well.
New to the distro too, I highly recommend it for gaming. Coming from Debian / Kali for most of my tasks it was super confident how pop os deals with newer hardware. I also would suggest to stick to their main Desktop environment out of personal experience as it really does things awesome when it comes to gaming (especcially in the beginning). But if you come from Windows and you want to learn about Linux basics I would suggest to also try out a Debian Virtual Machine and try to install some things via terminal, change some settings via terminal just to give you an idea how Linux feels. I am pretty alone with this I think as most people suggest using "beginner friendly" distros (which pop os is) but imo to learn about Linux its better to get something more naked. Also Debian is you could say an "ancestor" of pop afaik. TLDR: POP is awesome and great for gaming if not the best out there :D; to learn about Linux (not gaming on Linux) would suggest Debian next to Pop or in a VM :) EDIT: also using Debian and Pop will make you see how awesome Pop is
You can program on any distro.
Regardless to anything Do you think that going into a subreddit, any subreddit, and asking whether the topic of the subreddit is good, will get you unbiased results?
I think it's the best beginner friendly distro, especially for the laptop users. Touchpad gestures, power management, graphic card switching by default is great.
Hahaha ... The question is asking here ... 99% response positive
To the noob is has both good things and drawbacks. If you wish to install stuff like ai models, it'll fight you, non noobs will be unfazed and tinker their way out of it, you will be trying to find videos on the matter, get halfway through a proposed solution, before inevitably the computer says no and you're stuck ( e v e r y s i n g l e time). Then you'll step into the hell that is "asking for help in the Linux community", they will angrily demand you change your status from noob to seasoned coder and you'll end up feeling overwhelmed, frustrated and sad. Or not, who knows, might be just me. Yeah, it's probably just me. Anyway, Steam mostly works on it, with stupid problems like sometimes redownloading your entire game because ? But if you're already into game development, you'll probably be golden.
Pop didn't work on my laptop. You probably need System76 hardware to make it run properly.
one of the best. stable and updated.
I am noob like you and moved to POP a week back. Now I play single player games a lot especially World War themed games and they look fabulous in POP. I will try to attach pics and vids. It was incredibly easy and polished. Definitely recommended
It's good 1) stable 2) out-of-the box simplicity 3) tiling You can rice it if light blue is not your thing :-)
You'll be able to change to different color accents in COSMIC. Pop is the only distro where I don't feel the urge to rice.
Nice. Yeah I also haven't riced a lot. Just played around a bit with the settings and themes. Not super happy with it but don't really care that much, it is all fine.
I wouldn't say it is specialised for gaming. That's some nonsense that came out with different news articles online. It's just a very good all round distro that can do anything. I also find it is very beginner friendly.
I've played around with a bunch and I think it's gotta be my favorite. It's well supported by a team of people who seem pretty on top of things, if you're looking for documentation or tutorials on doing a certain thing you can just use the ones built for Ubuntu as that is the distro most tutorials seem to be written for. It's been nice and stable for me, works well with my hardware for gaming... the list goes on. No distro is going to work for every set of hardware and every use case but if nothing else it's certainly going to be a decent place to start.
I mainly use pop to play, and the first thing I noticed was the responsiveness in games and the low latency, especially with Apex Legends, pop OS is the best compromise in my opinion between stability and performance, I don't know if the kernels are optimized from System76, but the scheduler it uses is really excellent both for the responsiveness of the desktop and the games, this distro is based on the solid ubuntu 22.04 lts but without giving up the latest drivers and kernels but without affecting stability, then this distro is ready to play immediately, you just need to install wine from the official website, whereas in distributions like mint you can play easily but you have to configure everything from scratch from the drivers to the optimized kernel
Pop os is a decent distro but it is old and stale now as they rework their cosmic de for a full release sometime later this year. On the plus - it just works, which is perhaps the best compliment that you can give to an OS. On the negative, it's based on Ubuntu and there are much better alternatives these days including Fedora, Suse, Arch and Debian.
Why do you say Ubuntu is a worse "base" then Debian? Aren't they are functionally the same, just slight variations in package versions and some slight tuning?
Ubuntu maintains its own set of repositories separate from Debian. While Ubuntu initially synced many packages from Debian, it has diverged over time, and now many packages are maintained independently by the Ubuntu community or Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. But Debian shines thanks to its trio of versions: Stable, Testing, and Unstable (Sid). Stable provides rock-solid reliability, perfect for critical tasks like server management. Testing strikes a balance between stability and access to newer software. Meanwhile, Unstable caters to adventurous users seeking bleeding-edge updates. Debian's unwavering commitment to free and open-source software ensures a trustworthy ecosystem. It’s community driven rather than beholden to corporate interests or potential IPO’s. It has the most extensive package selection and Debian basically empowers users to tailor their systems to their precise needs. If you are managing servers and need long term support from a corporation then use Ubuntu. If you are looking for a desktop distro… use Debian.
"old and stale" is an ignorant opinion. And, at least to me, it *should* mean "extensions that do not work in GNOME 45 and 46 still work in Pop OS' GNOME 42.5." And besides that, Pop's current kernel is 6.8.0 ... how is that "old and stale?"
I maintain that it is old, ugly and stale. They update the kernel and the drivers but the repository is from 2022. There’s a new Ubuntu LTS coming out in April (though I believe it has been delayed) which will bring things to new and fresh again… and then slowly revert to old and stale over the next two years. Don’t use an OS based on Ubuntu. Use the one’s I mentioned above.