I’ve been using Linux on and off for about 15 years, but was never able to make the leap to using it full-time until PopOS. It’s been painless to use and does everything I need with only minor tweaks. Thank you System76! I can’t wait until the Cosmic DE is released.
(too bad about the name, though…)
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I use Linux all over for my server hosting, but not desktop OS. Out of curiosity, what were the things that held you back from using it full time? (Others feel free to share too please)
I will go first - gaming. I do also have a SteamDeck so I am fully aware that there has been lots of advancements there and that is great. For the most part, the games I currently play seem to play just fine on it (and I know some of that could be the Deck more than Linux itself). With all that said, I am still skittish about fully committing as my main desktop OS.
What about PopOS puts it over the edge for full time?
When I used it, it was the ability to switch window tiling on and off on the fly, and for each of those tiles to have tabs. I’ve switched to another distro but I keep using GNOME because of that specific shell extension.
Do you remember what that extension is called? Switched to fedora but I just can’t seem to find it and didn’t take note of what it was called
Yep, it’s Pop Shell. It’s in the Fedora repos so no jumping through hoops: https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-shell/
In my case it’s mostly that it works perfectly on laptops without any excessive power consumption or weird sleep-when-closed-lid problems. I still can’t get my fingerprint reader to work, but I can live with that. And it’s loaded with QoL stuff like the window tiling shortcut. But mainly, I just don’t have to fight with it, from installation to everyday use.
How did you like Linux Mint (if you tried it)? I thought that was supposed to be the easy one.
It’s been years since I’ve tried Mint! I remember it working well, but found it too Windows-like. That may seem like a weird criticism since that’s its raison d’etre, but I didn’t want to switch from Windows to get something that doesn’t feel different enough to be an upgrade. Mint is what I’d go for if I were installing Linux on my parents’ computer.
Speaking personally, it’s consistently done a great job of supporting the hardware on the laptops on which I’ve installed it without requiring any special effort on my part. (Ironically this wasn’t true for their own Oryx Pro laptop, but that was more because the laptop itself was barely functional and not because there was anything wrong with PopOS itself.)
I also really like its “Refresh Install” feature which reinstalls the operating system while keeping all of your non-system files in place, which I’ve used in a couple of unfortunate cases to go from a borked unbootable machine to a working machine in under 30 minutes. I mainly use this laptop for gaming so because Steam installs everything in my home directory my downloaded game library was fully preserved by this process.
Every day I have to use Windows at work makes me long to get home to Pop OS. It’s so much faster and cleaner. The amount of advertising windows hurls at you, even on Pro, is ridiculous.
I just switched from Pop!_OS to openSUSE, but not through any fault of Pop. I really liked it in fact, and it was great to have a distro to show me out of the box what was possible on other distros after a bit of configuration. It’s certainly tempting me to get a System76 laptop.
Same. Tried Linux Mint years ago on my laptop, but had weird Bluetooth issues with my headphones and keyboard, so stopped using it. Recently put Pop!_OS on my gaming rig and it works perfectly! I’m not a power user, and mainly just use Firefox & Steam. A couple windows programs I’ve been able to use with Lutris. I’m super happy with it
