Pop _OS 22.04 LTS has landed
blog.system76.comThey only thing I dislike about PopOS is that they have not gone all in on ZFS. The base Ubuntu has it.
They could really move ahead of every other distro if they had ZFS native encryption by default.
A distro relying on an out of tree filesystem as default sounds like a really bad idea to me. I didn't know Ubuntu shipped with ZFS in the default kernel.
Also luks and btrfs are good enough, and in-tree. They might not be as fancy as ZFS, but it's a better choice to use as default as they're standard and widespread.
Why is it a bad idea? ZFS sees tons of usage and gets shipped with multiple distros.
And I will simply never ever again use btrfs. Sorry, you can't claim to be stable and then lose my files to different times.
With ZFS I can use encrypted zfs send as a backup mechanism. Much preferable to alternatives.
You can choose the filesystem when you install. Generic install vs custom install.
That and their (understandable, but annoying) reluctance to enable Wayland.
They could at least make it optional, but given that they sell computers, I understand why they wouldn't want to enable a feature which may still cause problems...
Wayland still has issues
This is another good example for what I described in my other comment - they only care for their very special setup but break the underlying distro in many ways.
PopOS devs take the work of Ubuntu, add their 0.1% but break a lot of things that work good in [X|K]Ubuntu - that is not helpful for the OS ecosystem. They distribute a broken distro that only works within a very narrow default configuration. Not OK.
Very much disagree. They actually do more work then you suggest they do. And they upstream that work quite often, and its open source.
Second, if you want X/K then why would you care about Pop? How is PopOS existing bad for you?
It is bad because of the reasons I explained in my other comment.
They pretend to release a whole distro while in fact they are only caring for a narrow set of packages and break other functionality of the same underlying distro. This is bad.
If you distribute a whole distro it is expected that everything works, like it is the case with Debian or Ubuntu. It might produce a bad image of Linux as perceived by new users when they realize that many things of this distro do not work at all. This is not the quality delivered by other Linux distros, so it is doing a bad job in representing Linux.
At least they should explain that on their website, e.g. "We deliver something we call a distro but this is not the same thing as you get from other people that deliver distros, we are only actively supporting one special desktop environment, but other things might not work as experienced with other distributions. We decided anyway to pretend we are releasing a whole Linux distro because..." (reason should be explained.)
I hope this was better explained. I still totally respect the work they put into it and I am thankful that a company is doing this at all, but they are distributing their software in a bad way.
Does anyone else recommend this to people first trying out Linux? I have been mentioning this and Mint (though I use Debian PopOS! seems like the better of the two), and I'm curious which of them (or any other distro) helps convert more Windows users. I stopped recommending Ubuntu a few years ago because of snaps, they're such an Ubuntu specific thing in practice that I think it's harmful for people learning Linux.
I never recommend minor distros to new users (and honestly to anyone else) for the simple reason that there is no guarantee they'll stick around or are secure. Newbies need something that is guaranteed to be supported for years.
For new users Ubuntu is by far the sanest distribution because it ships with codecs and drivers, is backed by a sizable company, and has by far the widest software support. Only Linux enthusiasts are obsessed with snaps.
Pop isn't really that minor anymore, specially in Linux gaming. And its backed by an actual company.
It ships with more up to date hardware support then Ubuntu.
Fair point, from personal experience would you say people tend to stick with Linux if you recommend Ubuntu and they actually give it a good try?
yes although there's an uncanny valley. I've given a lot of older family members linux laptops and they do just fine given that they mostly browse the web. At the other end devs do fine with linux anyway. Problem is still the people in the middle. Even on the most mainstream distro there's still frustration if they work with software they can't replace and that's still often the case.
I've honestly started suggesting Fedora over anything Debian/Ubuntu based. Ubuntu stability has gotten worse and worse over time, and their approach to software package management has gotten kind of crazy with Snaps.
I usually recommend Fedora for stability and up to date packages. And this is someone that has used Ubuntu since 4.04 and recently a ton of Arch/Manjaro usage. I have personally switched to Fedora with how little fiddling i need to do and how stable everything is, and things just work. If you want to go Arch, I recommend EndeavorOS for that.
I would recommend PopOS as a 2nd option after Fedora though, its the better distro of the Debian descendents.
Um... there wasn't a 4.04? The first release was Warty Warthog, 4.10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history#Ubuntu_...
I find it interesting that you say that, though, if only because Warty is when I personally moved from SUSE to Ubuntu, and I've never seen any reason to switch. My occasional trials of Fedora seem to have drawn the reverse conclusion to you.
* There are no stable releases. For boxes I work on, I want something slow-changing and stable. For boxes I experiment with, I want something fairly fast-moving and agile. For me, the LTS/short-term split is perfect for that.
* Ubuntu is more pragmatic about proprietary drivers and so on. Fedora makes it a pain.
* Ubuntu's 3rd party driver support is the best in the industry, AFAICT.
So I am curious to know in what ways you find Fedora better than Ubuntu.
You are correct, 4.10. it's been a while and I forget which month Warty was.
For me, Ubuntu has too many old packages, so it's too unchanging. The 6 month span is plenty for stability for me.
To me stability revolves around stuff breaking between updates, or installing packages causing incompatibilities that eventually degrade the system. I had a lot of that with Manjaro.
While Ubuntu has little of that, it's also too safe, too behind. There were so many times I needed a slightly newer version than what Ubuntu offered, so I would need to hunt for PPAs, manually maintain Deb files, or find other means of keeping stuff up to date. My sources.list.d would be littered with extra repos.
Fedora is a lot more up to date, their repositories are a lot more filled out. I found stuff in the repos that is not in the Ubuntu repos. They are usually fairly up to date, or at most x.x.1 behind kind of thing.
* 2 years is too old. Might be stable but outdated.
* I have had no problems with proprietary drivers. Most of my machines are amd GPUs, but I have a Nvidia 2070 laptop that works fine. Just installed from dnf and it works.
* I haven't hit any 3rd party driver needs. Printers, PC components, accessories. They all work fine without third party drivers. But it could also be because Fedora has a more up to date kernel.
Anyways, I value a balance of up to date software, stability, and just getting out of the way. Which Fedora, especially Fedora 36 that I'm using, does better than Ubuntu and it's derivatives do.
I will say, I just recently switched to Fedora after last trying it many years ago and hating it. I had a bit of hate for the RPM world since old Red Hat Linux days before I made the jump to Ubuntu. So it might be a honeymoom phase, but I'm so much happier with Fedora than the Debian based ecosystem.
OK, fair enough. Thanks for the info!
I write about this stuff for a living these days, so I am trying to widen the range of distros that I try, that I use, and to learn more about why people choose particular ones.
Totally fair, and I appreciate you asking with an open mind. I have nothing strong against Ubuntu or any debian/ubuntu derivatives. Its still a good distro to recommend.
Also Fedora relies a lot on Flatpaks for most desktop software, so the repos only come into play for command-line tools or something more system related or if you want a native copy of something. Like Discord, Slack, Element, etc are all flatpaks on my install.
Then tools like exa, ripgrep, and so on come from Fedora repos or `asdf` if not in the repos or if i temporarily need a fix in a latest version that is a bit behind in Fedora.
For everyday users, the difference isnt huge if they want to word process, browse the web, play some games, print stuff, get some photos off a camera, etc.
I think in the end I just wanted something between Ubuntu and a rollign release system like Arch or even Suse Tumbleweed.
Also, I just realized who I'm talking with, loved your article/presentation on "Starting Over".
:-D Thank you very much!
I don't suggest Fedora, since it's more advanced. (I might get shot saying this...) Difficult where I need to start.
I tried to use the release before and it was a mixed bag. While the default desktop is quite OK and everything seems to work, as you install another desktop environment like eg XFCE everything breaks. This is of course a very bad example of a Linux distro, such a thing does not happen with Ubuntu. In fact it seems to me that besides the very narrow focus on their preferred desktop they do not seem to care about all the other packages.
This again leads to the conclusion that they did not understand what a distro is about. Of course you want to support all the packages / desktops that come with a distro, not just your preferred set of packages. In fact they are actively destroying other parts of the distro with that.
Instead they should just offer a PPA repo with their modifications / addons - but much better would be if they just fed their changes to upstream instead of pretending to release a whole distro when in fact they just release some packages and maintaining the whole thing is way too much for them.
That leaves a bad taste. It is not clear why they need to release their additions and modifications in such a way, but for me as a new Linux user it was one of the most interesting revelations that I could (un-) install several desktop environments without any problems, this was a huge learning motivation.
So unfortunately this POPOS thing must be declared as a "false" attempt on how to distribute software for Linux. I still would recommend Ubuntu for newcomers, but teach them that several problems that might come up still exist - that is the price for software freedom you have to pay. Still snaps are not a real problem for many users and I understand why they exist, but personally find them horrible, too.
I manage the laptops and desktops of a >50 company. And I've installed PopOs on almost all of their systems (some have Ubuntu) I'm very happy with the stability and indeed the sane defaults. Most users are happy with it and a lot of them are new to Linux. Learned of PopOs through buying some System76 laptops. Being able to download a nvidia version of the iso image has really helped as well.
Whenever I try to use Mint theres always something weird that happens that won’t seamlessly install or something, most recently it was steam games not being able to start. A couple of years ago I installed Pop and the automatic tiling paired with Gnome was very offputting (I’v e gone back and forth with Pop Os because of gnome seemingly eating up memory), when, in previous installs, the tiling thing didn’t happen. Also I dont really like/understand relying on websites and browser extensions to modify gnome bits. I switched to Kubuntu and it was great… with an AMD gpu. I upgraded to a 6700xt a couple of months ago from a rx480 and it was great, but I sent it back and switched to an nvidia 3060ti because of being interested in dipping my feet in video editing. I found trying to use the nvidia gpu with Kubuntu was a real hassle I couldnt figure out (I couldnt log in even after running a command in safe mode installing nvidia drivers) so I went back to Pop and kind of grin and bear gnome because my new system has 64gigs of ram, the Pop team is working on their rust based DE, and because Pop can come with Nvidia drivers included. Regarding snaps, I really like that PopOS tells you whether a given package is a snap or deb and that you can choose (for now at least), but I try to avoid snaps myself.
TIL bout their rust based DE.
I also tried kubuntu starting out because i wanted a plasma desktop but found it a bit janky defaults wise. I settled on Manjaro KDE tho. Much nicer defaults, much more software available after checking some boxes in the software centre and choosing the nvidia drivers was relatively easy. (a neat menu to choose between the various options of open source or nvidias own stuff)
I really have a hard time moving away from debian (really ubuntu at this point) based distros because of all the support and howto articles written for this family of distros and the dearth of little doo dad apps written for the debian eco system (such as the thinkpad power manager or the debian specific implementation of that old os x app caffeine just as examples). Its really not based on laziness or close mindedness, but just that I want to get going with doing things on my computer.
I've been using Pop_OS for 4 years and installed it on about 5 machines. The set-up is well-documented. IMO the latest versions have shifted the desktop experience closer to MacOS than to Windows/Ubuntu.
That said I think it's still a fine distro to explore for folks new to Linux.
I used to until I came across. Endeavour OS. The AUR is so damn convenient, anyone I show it to just immediately falls in love with it.
I moved away from Windows at the beginning of the year. My first Distro was Linux Mint, then Ubuntu 22.04 and yesterday I installed Pop_OS 22.04. Fedora didn't fit my requirements as it doesn't support fractional scaling.
All very, very solid.
I gave Pop_OS a try because I wanted a simple tiling window manager. It does all I want.
The only thing I don't like is the color theme. I know it's a matter of taste but Pop_OS is by far the ugliest out there. Also the default backgrounds. Or the stacking window bar. I wonder what other users are thinking ...
Otherwise is seems very awesome so far. I don't understand the complains regarding the Pop Shop. I think it's actually pretty good. E.g. I can choose to install VS Code from Flathub or as deb Package. That's nice.
> The only thing I don't like is the color theme.
I'm also a new user of Pop_OS, and loving it. Nordic theme is my favorite.
https://github.com/EliverLara/Nordic
For the background, I like macOS Mojave's default wallpaper, which blends well with the above theme.
http://www.hdwallpaperslife.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/m...
> Fedora didn't fit my requirements as it doesn't support fractional scaling.
This is desktop dependent, not distro dependent.
Only a few desktops support it so far: GNOME 3.x, KDE 5.x, and Cinnamon are the only ones I know of.
Saying that I could not get it working on Ubuntu Cinnamon $LATEST. It does work on Mint $LATEST with the same release of Cinnamon.
I updated to Popos 22.04 yesterday and I immediately had problems with prisma (Error: Unknown binaryTarget debian-openssl-3.0.x and no custom binaries were provided). This is probably ubuntu/openssl related rather than pops.
They do have a fix (you can switch to dev branch) or wait for it to be released next Tuesday: https://github.com/prisma/prisma/issues/11356#issuecomment-1...
I normally wait at least a month :facepalm: Might want to wait a week or so before updating.
Big fan of Pop_OS... I'm using it on a Framework laptop. Great sane defaults and look and feel.
How was the fingerprint reader working out of the box? Did you have to do anything?
As of December 2021, it did not, but it is much improved from the various threads on framework forums.
> apt install libpam-fprintd
Settings > Users > Fingerprint Login
kernel 5.16, pop_os 21.10, gnome 40.4.0
the best thing about pop os for me is the very sane default, out of the box experience. especially it's tiling by default and covers most basic use cases.
What are the top choices everyone would suggest in terms of Linux OS for reasonably upgraded packages, package availability in terms of dev/tech person and perhaps most importantly a sane and reasonably pain free upgrade path (no reinstall every year or something).
Server, workstation, gaming or casual use?
I like plain old debian for servers. If you don't need new hardware support its bombproof and really well supported.
For laptops...Mint or Pop. Pop seems better to me than Ubuntu as its pretty slimmed down but most of the debian recipes work on it and it works with Nvidia laptops really well (as does Mint).
I can't really recommend Ubuntu any more. The snap thing is just not cool.
CentOS seemed cool when I ran it up in a VM recently, but since my server stuff is debian, I stick with debian variants.
Yeah, difficult to answer, Pop! Is the answer, I'm a RHEL person, so I stay faithful, but Pop! is really nice with all those small changes.
ZFS is great for laptops. Automatic snapshots, error detection (the hardware is mishandled), encrypted backup, compression for limited space, etc.
Why removing it?
ZFS was designed for spinning disks - what is the performance meant to be like on modern NVMe SSDs? I have ZFS on my laptop and do not see very good numbers, but it's possible I misconfigured something.
Any idea if ARM will be officially supported?
There is already a RasPi 4 version.
AFAIK no other Arm machines are supported.
Does it support secure boot yet?
Not at all. Ubuntu or Fedora for that.