It’s an Ubuntu downstream maintained by Linux box maker System76 which is targeted for both general usability and design/media applications. They will soon be debuting their own home-spun desktop environment, Cosmic DE, which is highly anticipated by the Linux community.
How does the community here feel about this distribution and the company that has brought it to us? How do you feel about the projects that they’re working on, and their goals for the distribution moving forward?
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POP is an excellent distro for a number of use cases. I can’t speak to System 76 hardware but Pop is definitely one of the good Distros. I have used it for about 5ish years to run Davinci Resolve on video editing laptops and workstations. Another use case for POP was for breaking Mac OS acclimated relatives out of their walled gardens. Relatives as old as 80 have had very little problem adjusting to it after having help installing it. Looking forward to Cosmic but I will make sure I have backups and other stuff to tinker with during the transition - was the same way during Wayland transition on my other machines.
Positives
- Davinci Resolve working with a little bit of fiddling and continues to run solidly.
- No hassle with Nvidia drivers on editing laptop.
- 4-5 years daily driver on Thinkpads (t460,13) and other older laptops (daily use)
- Gaming on Nvidia good.
- Elder folks adjust easily from Mac OS. Its basically Macbuntu for them without the complete pile of shit that is Snaps.
Negatives
- POP Shop was kinda shite. Had a few problems years ago. Wasn’t patient during upgrades or used terminal. A couple of shitty things happening recently but looking forward to testing out everything Cosmic (I have a rock solid edit station that will remain AMD on Endeavour OS to make sure I can still work).
- Name doesn’t bother me, but would be better as just POP OS
I use pop for my nvidia laptop and it works great. System76 seems to be on the right track and I‘m curious what they have in store for the future.
I recently tried this for the first time for my grandad on an old dying laptop of his which was struggling to run at any speed.
During the install it had already messed with the hard drive partitions in order to run the live environment, which is a big no-no for me.
The whole point of the live environment is it shouldn’t change the system until you try to install!
It also meant I no longer had a free partition to install to anymore so I couldn’t even get through the installer since I also couldn’t resize etc. because the partition was in use.
Been using Debian/Ubuntu based Linux for about 20 years and never seen this issue until Pop! OS
During the install it had already messed with the hard drive partitions in order to run the live environment, which is a big no-no for me.
WHAA??‽!!
Ok, I’ve been dealing with this distribution for close to a decade and I’ve installed it on over a dozen machines of all sorts of configurations. I’ve never heard of this. I’m very curious as to hooooow this happened.
From all of my experience and everything I know, this absolutely should not have happened and could only be the result of some sort of mistake or bug or some usual circumstance. This is not the typical or normal experience.
Yeah just tried it again now.
I deleted the partition again first, then when I got to the installer, it had created a new 50GB partition and mounted /var/crash and /var/log which can’t be unmounted (tried force unmount and all that jazz)
I once had a installer crash and wipe my drive in the process.
Like, as a bug, right? Not as SOP?
I mean, I get that - as a rare occurrence - shit can go wrong. I wouldn’t blame openSUSE (for example) if that happened during an install. I’d just assume it was a bug and that I was having a shitty day.
It was some new distro that I forgot everything else about. It was very new so it problems were to be expected. I just didn’t expect it to wipe out my disk. I was trying to dual boot.
I get where you’re coming from, it just blows my mind that you encountered this outrageously rare problem that must certainly have been a bug.
You must understand, this was not intended behavior, nor should this ever have happened. I’m very sorry for your experience.
That was many years ago back when Linux was the new kid on the block
Popos has only been around for 6 1/2 years. Linux has been around since the 90s.
It shouldn’t have touched anything
Use it on my lenovo carbon x1 flawlessly. Love it.
Used it for a good while, but I moved to Nobara for more up to date packages. Might look into it again when Cosmic releases, it looks promising. I just hope they have some way to use Gnome extensions (or a replacement).
GNOME Shell extensions are JavaScript monkey patch injections to gnome-shell’s JavaScript process. They’re only compatible with the exact version of gnome-shell that they target because most of them require to override private internals of gnome-shell that are sensitive to order of injection and names of private variables and methods.
COSMIC uses a modern Wayland-based approach to shell interface design with layer-shell applets. Each applet is its own process, using the layer-shell Wayland protocol to render their windows as shell components, and communicating with the compositor securely with the security context Wayland protocol. The protocols they use are standardized, so they will be stable across COSMIC releases. Other Wayland compositors could integrate with them if they desire to.
For some reason, referring to a computer or VM that runs Linux as a “Linux box” triggers me.
The UI seemed like it wasted a lot of space. I hope that Cosmic is better in that regard.
A semi-rolling distribution, with access to Ubuntu’s many PPA’s, and easily removable extensions that reveal the lovely vanilla Gnome experience, it’s great!
Also they are making a Rust desktop, which I am currently running, though not daily driving.
How are you running COSMIC? I’m on Fedora.
There’s a COPR repo
ryanabx/cosmic-epochAnd it works and seems to be regularly updated! Thanks for bringing this to my attention!
I am on Pop!_OS, I ran
sudo apt install cosmic*.Don’t worry, you’re not missing out on much, running video games, or any OpenGL thing including 2D games and GPU-accelerated terminal emulators is a bad experience, and alt+f4 isn’t implemented, and f11 to fullscreen is janky, and theming for buttons and such is clearly alpha.
The promise of an Arabic-supporting, Rust based, GPU-accelerated terminal is too attractive, however, as I was teared between multilingual terminal, Wezterm, Alacritty and Kitty for a while.
The first is horrible at everything but supporting languages, the second is really janky, the third doesn’t support tabs, the fourth has bad theming and customization.
You’re not missing out on much
Seems that you’re right. It’s almost usable currently, but it lacks some essential things for me, mainly some further snappiness and customisable key binds (old habits die hard and I’m not adapting my habits and workflow to new keybinds).
But after these get fixed, I can see myself potentially running COSMIC. This makes me even more excited for what the future will bring.
Edit: Also, sloppy focus aka focus-follows-mouse
And an option for static workspaces i.e a set number of workspaces that are constantly there, instead of dynamic workspaces that close with your windows and change your workflow because you closed the window on Workspace 4 so workspace 5 is now workspace 4 so when you go looking for the window on workspace 5, it’s not there.
Also, sloppy focus aka focus-follows-mouse
It’s one of those features I always wanted to try, but always forget to look up how to actually enable and start using it, so I never actually tried it.
Highly recommend trying it, especially on a tiling window manager! (doesn’t seem to be available for COSMIC yet, and I don’t think it’s in other DEs either, but I know floating WMs like Openbox had sloppy focus iirc.
What GPU configuration do you have? I don’t have any of these issues. If NVIDIA, you have to wait for NVIDIA to release explicit sync Wayland drivers.
Inaccurate report,
I just ran Neovim in terminal and was used to Neovide, so I thought it was choppy.
Intel HD 630.
There is, however, a 2D game - which I am not going to disclose the name of - that’s pretty broken. (It uses Adobe Flash as an engine)
Also the steam client doesn’t maximize properly with tiling but I am sure that’s reported.
I have been daily driving Cosmic for a week now; it caused me Arch-syndrome, everyday I run
sudo apt updatehoping to get some polish to the desktop.Edit: there’s more…
Neovide’s transparency is completely broken, and shows a blank, though not a pitch black, color and screenshotting it results in seeing the text with a checkered background. (In the resulting screenshot only) (Running on Proton 8.0-5)
clipboard=unnamed plus, the setting supposed to unify Neovim’s clipboard and system’s, doesn’t work.clipboard: error : Error: target STRING not availableI also was unable to transfer a file to my phone using Cosmic Files, but Nemo worked, though I read that’s fixed in some Blog.
Edit II: I just discovered
popdev:masterit seems to be a general unstable branch instead of just Cosmic things, but I took the risk and added it, I just have to remember to remove it once 24.04’s releasedWhat report are you referring to?
running video games, or any OpenGL thing including 2D games and GPU-accelerated terminal emulators is a bad experience
The thing you replied to; I don’t open social media often enough to reply on time, so I sent you a late reply.
what are the benefits of a gpu-accelerated terminal?
Consumes less energy (CPU) while also rendering more responsively.
I like their company and what they do for Linux. I wish I had a use for a laptop but then I would be stuck between system76 or framework.
And tuxedo. Depending on your country.
This sounds like written by an Ai or some marketing person…
Ordinary people don’t use phrases like “box maker System 76” or “highly anticipated by the Linux community”…:)
I’m sorry you think that.
Get out more.
greg just fucking cooked
No, he’s right. You sound like you’re writing a corporate ad.
He’s got a point though, these sound more like ‘online article on tech website’ phrases, less like a community post. Not meant to be insulting, I just like to analyse language.
I thought the exact same thing. It’s written like the uncanny valley of English.
I’ve had Linux pop OS on a USB and ran it for about a year and a half total before switching on and off to windows. I think it’s one of the few OSes that actually work on all my devices even obscure thinkpads. I’d still use it today however -
My issues with Linux as a whole stem from absolutely trash antivirus and auditing perspective. Windows suffers this in many ways but I think they’re a live service rather than a static service. I’ll give an example, we’re getting bitlocker encryption with backup support keys etc in case a user gets locked out of a device on all devices very soon in W11h24 I believe, as a default. Pop OS comes with disk encryption but if I forgot my password or what have you, or even want to make a USB encryption key to unlock the device if I forgot it, I’d be in trouble. There’s an element of user friendliness that OSX and Windows have, that Linux just doesn’t have. I get scared running these open source applications when we’re essentially in a Cold War and I need to depend on them for my business. Especially if the apps are developed in JavaScript there’s so many dependencies I can’t verify. I can use portmaster and some log trailing to sift it but something about it feels like I am still not secure.
I’m gonna venture to guess that your problems are not with your operating systems. Best of luck to you.
Lick my sack
Even though I wasn’t a fan of their modified Gnome DE, I really like the distro as a whole. It made it seamless to use both AMD and Nvidia cards, Steam worked out of the box, and I had no issues with using Ubuntu or Debian repos. I’m not sure whether I’ll use Cosmic or not, but I’ll probably give it a fair try eventually.
I like their window manager, pop-shell, and use it on Fedora. I used to daily Pop but just can’t stand Ubuntu.
As someone newer who has only used Ubuntu and Mint, what do you get elsewhere?
Why can’t you stand Ubuntu?
I imagine it being about snaps. People seems to hate snap with a passion.
I still use Ubuntu in certain cases. Their LTS offerings are excellent.
Yea but why?
Pop! Is a solid Ubuntu-based distro. I use it on my MSI gaming PC and my System76 laptop.
The S76 (Lemur Pro) laptop is nice, but it isn’t excellent, especially not for the price. I’m happy with it, but I probably won’t buy another one unless they make significant improvements to the screen and chassis.
My only experience was on a shared machine (the $5,000 prebuilt offering) where one of the less tech literate people messed with nvidia drivers for data science. Worse, I was remote and it had some software from IT running.
Basically some combination of those things meant we ended up running it in recovery mode and all shared the same user. I think I downplay how shit that job was in my head.
The support from the company was ASS and I’m doubtful there was a human responding for the first few messages. I gave them very detailed logs of the issue, with links to their own documentation, and their response suggested they didn’t read past the first sentence. Really can’t imagine why I wouldn’t just stick to debian when the company support is worthless even after giving them 5k.
What year was this? Very rarely, I have heard bad experiences like this, but they were from a long time ago. From everything I’ve heard since (I’ve never had to contact their support, myself), their support - and their hardware - has massively improved.
Edit: I also have heard (unconfirmed) that they have a separate B2B unit now that has a separate support unit, too.
About a year and a half ago. I am the anxious bug filling type as well, I make my questions very clear and provide all the info I anticipate they may need. That does not help when the info is not read. I had to copy and paste quite a bit from previous emails. This is while I was at a pretty significant institution as well.
Really? That recently? I’m really quite surprised. Especially at the low quality of customer support you received.
Of course, this should never have happened. A live install medium should never make alterations to an internal drive. I really just don’t know how that could’ve happened. Or why it happened. It must obviously have been a bug of some sort. My mind is boggled.
I’m not the one who mentioned the instal medium but yeah I was pretty surprised as well. I’m sure I could’ve sorted things if I was on premise and could have IT reinstall their software.
