Note: I am not from the Pop team so this has nothing to do with them. I am just a user who wants shit to work and not distro hop every couple of months.
Not trying to invoke a distro war here, but I recently bought a second hand sys76 laptop. The build is ok not fantastic like thinkpads or macs, but i wanted to try out their distro - Pop OS. It runs pretty great, smooth and very snappy. I really like the best of both worlds - tiling vs floating windows.
That said, I see a lot of hate for this distro. Christ Tirus Tech posted multiple videos ditching this OS like it is garbage. Linus Tech Tips had that self owned moment when he installed Pop and crashed it, so not a good marketing for the OS.
I used Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, Arch. Each has its pros and cons but the hostility is nowhere near the ones Pop gets. Did the devs fucked up because they did something stupid to the OS, like Manjaro team when they forgot to renew security certificates?
To preface this thought, I believe most distros are fine when matched with the users technical appetite and expectations. I also feel that focusing on the question “which distro?” first is a trap. I would suggest exploring the various window managers first and see what common distros offer it.
For example if you want to use cosmic but would would rather use something popular there is the Fedora COSMIC Spin. Or if you’re just looking for a solid alternative that feels like windows there’s Kubuntu LTS 26.04.
PopOS is essentially maintaining an fork of Ubuntu’s LTS branch with a rolling release kernel and recently bolting on an experimental (not to be read as unstable) window manager.
Personally I feel this makes it a poor choice for users that don’t want frequent updates and/or are uncomfortable with troubleshooting issues.
If you’re leaning on first party support for hardware that ships with popOS that would make it a reasonable candidate.
I don’t see much in the value PopOS provides over Ubuntu flavours like Kubuntu. Or the various spins of Fedora. I would expect the 26.04 release of Ubuntu to cover nearly all first time users and most hardware configurations better than popOS. (With the exception of their own hardware releases.)
Additionally I disagree with the way they maintain their kernel. I would suggest to users that benefit from these frequent updates or value being on the bleeding edge to consider a rolling release such as OpenSUSE TW. (Or Arch if you want to make your computer your hobby and have a strong appetite for technical challenges)
Ultimately it’s fine, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed using popOS if you like their window manager. There are less users using it so problems that arise may take longer to resolve or be detected by the community. Personally if you’re going to be using something based on Ubuntu id suggest just using that or one of their main “flavours”. Especially given your desire for something that just works.
Please forgive any mistakes, I didn’t intend to write this much and it’s late. Hopefully I did alright with exploring the topic without any significant bias or error. I welcome any feedback or corrections.
Pop! OS is fine, but they recently moved to COSMIC and are focusing their resources towards it. Hence, it’s currently a little unstable while the rest of the OS is also receiving less attention. It’s not bad, it’s just something to be mindful of if something breaks or there’s some graphical glitch. System76’s website doesn’t really make it very clear that COSMIC is sort of in beta right now.
If you want my take on it, as long as you’re not using anything too ancient, a majority of distros will work with most hardware. Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Bazzite, Nobara, Arch-based distros (CachyOS, EndeavourOS, etc.), OpenSUSE, are all good. Thanks to the work of the developers of all these, they’re all good, at the very least, far better than Windows (but that’s a pretty low bar…). Unless you’re running very new hardware (in which case, something more up-to-date would be better, like Fedora-based options and rolling release distros), have particular requirements (like Steam Big Picture Mode), or just don’t like the ethics/philosophy of a particular distro, most (not ALL, but most) distros are fine. In any case, it’s relatively straightforward to distro-hop.
To my knowledge, the only real “bad” distro (that is relatively modern) is probably Manjaro, since it markets itself as being beginner-friendly, but it is arguably a little less stable than base Arch. They also forgot about renewing their SSL certificates numerous times. Here’s a link that highlights some weird quirks of Manjaro: https://manjarno.pages.dev/ (if you want a simplified installer for Arch, use either archinstall or, if you need a GUI, EndeavourOS / CachyOS)
I personally use EndeavourOS, but I wouldn’t recommend it for a beginner as there are issues that need to be tinkered with. Endeavour doesn’t market itself as stable and beginner-friendly though, so I have no problems with it. They do add a few nice touches that make the usability a bit nicer, but they mostly stick close to base Arch.
Modern distro wars are silly in my opinion.
Very nice explanation. One minor detail though:
Endeavour doesn’t market itself as stable
Endeavour OS is per normal Linux developer definition unstable.
But that doesn’t mean what some people think it means. It only means it’s not feature freezed because it’s a rolling distro.
It doesn’t mean that it has more bugs, it can in theory have fewer bugs, because bug fixes are part of newer versions, and because it runs on newer versions of software.What it means is that some features may change, and that can cause problems in a production environment. So often professionals prefer stable especially to avoid changes that may cause breakage of their routines, because features are frozen and do not change, which guarantees that production is not affected by changes that were not prepared for.
Many people believe stable means more reliable and fewer bugs, but that is not always the case. In my experience Arch derivatives are often more “reliable” and have fewer bugs than a “stable” OS like Ubuntu.
I haven’t tried Endeavour, but I used the older Antergos that Endeavour replaces, and Antergos was amazing IMO.
One thing in particular that makes a rolling release sometimes more reliable, is that it has newer drivers, and newer drivers often have bug fixes.
Especially for games newer graphics drivers are less likely to lack features a game may need.I personally use EndeavourOS, and yeah, it’s great! I would never recommend it to a beginner starting out with Linux though, since being rolling release some things do occasionally break. It’s not often, but when it does, it can be annoying for a newbie. One example I can remember is when KDE Plasma stopped working around the time it was recently updated (for context, I am using a 2-in-1 touchscreen laptop. That probably had to do with the weird bug), but after a bug fix release it now seems to work fine. I’m fine with that since I like tinkering around with computers though. EndeavourOS also doesn’t come with a graphical app store either, but that’s for the better since installing AUR apps with very low friction is a bad idea (it’s one of the criticisms of Manjaro actually). All of this is fine, as EndeavourOS never claimed to be the most beginner-friendly distro in the first place. As per its site: it’s a minimal and terminal-centric Arch-based distribution. It knows what it is and that’s what I like about it :D
- another detail, I said it doesn’t market itself as stable (which is true), not that it is inherently instable (which, as you described, is partially false). I do think that rolling release distros can be good if you know what you’re doing, but for a newcomer to Linux, it’s not my first choice. That would probably go to Mint, Fedora, or similar depending on their hardware.
Personally I prefer rolling releases, because apart from being generally more up to date having all the newest features, I also like to generally only have to fix 1 problem at a time. Where a dist-upgrade for a non rolling release sometimes have more problems at once.
I feel like I have fewer problems on average with rolling releases.
To add another point, choosing a distro does matter sometimes depending on your hardware and use case. But most distros are not inherently bad, they just serve different use cases. Debian and CachyOS are targeting entirely different markets, for example, where the former is uber-stable with a very slow update schedule and the latter rolling release with very fast updates.
Nah, it’s just a beginner-friendly OS, so it gets some hate from the “I had to suffer to learn this, so you should too” crowd.
Cosmic still has some issues, but it’s pretty easy to install another DE and use that instead.
Pop is still my goto for desktops because it has good hardware compatibility and it’s easy to use.
I see a lot of hate for this distro.
That’s true for every distro.
To answer:
IDK if PopOS fucked up recently, but generally speaking, no, nothing as bad as Manjaro.Afaik people don’t trust the in house desktop environment they’re still developing. It’s not mature yet, but pop uses a stable release model. That’s the biggest thing besides snaps? I can’t remember if they use snaps but everyone hates on snaps a lot.
I find it very easy to install and use. Drivers work fine out of the box. The window and desktop management is my favorite ever, so it stays on the home desktop. There are a few things like flatpaks from the cosmic store not always working properly, and you need to remove them and install stuff from deb packages instead. And I couldn’t get any clipboard manager app to work, I think that’s related to a more general wayland issue, but nevertheless frustrating.
I dislike Pop!_OS because it just didn’t seem keyboard-friendly to navigate. I like enviros that at least try to cater somewhat to mouse-averse people like me who aren’t capable of jumping to 100% Terminal action. If I recall correctly, the animations/transitions were also less-impressive to the point of feeling cheap and unprofessional.
It’s fine but the tiling algorithm is broken and there are visual bugs. I’ll stay with Mint for the moment.
Did they not switch recently to Cosmic DE? Maybe people do not like that?
I tried PopOS a few years ago. I did not particularly care for their Gnome implementation, but other than that, it was quite decent.
