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…)
What about PopOS puts it over the edge for full time?
Pop just worked out of the box for me, which is a huge consideration.
I couldn’t get mint to display on more than 1 display and driver installation was a nightmare. So much so that I had to go recreate a windows usb to get back to having display out.
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.
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/
Thanks!