Pop _OS 22.04 LTS has landed (opens in new tab)

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

How was the fingerprint reader working out of the box? Did you have to do anything?

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 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.

There is already a RasPi 4 version.

AFAIK no other Arm machines are supported.

Not at all. Ubuntu or Fedora for that.