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?
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 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
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.