They could really move ahead of every other distro if they had ZFS native encryption by default.
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.
And I will simply never ever again use btrfs. Sorry, you can't claim to be stable and then lose my files to different times.
With ZFS I can use encrypted zfs send as a backup mechanism. Much preferable to alternatives.
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...
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.
Second, if you want X/K then why would you care about Pop? How is PopOS existing bad for you?
They pretend to release a whole distro while in fact they are only caring for a narrow set of packages and break other functionality of the same underlying distro. This is bad.
If you distribute a whole distro it is expected that everything works, like it is the case with Debian or Ubuntu. It might produce a bad image of Linux as perceived by new users when they realize that many things of this distro do not work at all. This is not the quality delivered by other Linux distros, so it is doing a bad job in representing Linux.
At least they should explain that on their website, e.g. "We deliver something we call a distro but this is not the same thing as you get from other people that deliver distros, we are only actively supporting one special desktop environment, but other things might not work as experienced with other distributions. We decided anyway to pretend we are releasing a whole Linux distro because..." (reason should be explained.)
I hope this was better explained. I still totally respect the work they put into it and I am thankful that a company is doing this at all, but they are distributing their software in a bad way.
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.
It ships with more up to date hardware support then Ubuntu.
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 find it interesting that you say that, though, if only because Warty is when I personally moved from SUSE to Ubuntu, and I've never seen any reason to switch. My occasional trials of Fedora seem to have drawn the reverse conclusion to you.
* There are no stable releases. For boxes I work on, I want something slow-changing and stable. For boxes I experiment with, I want something fairly fast-moving and agile. For me, the LTS/short-term split is perfect for that.
* Ubuntu is more pragmatic about proprietary drivers and so on. Fedora makes it a pain.
* Ubuntu's 3rd party driver support is the best in the industry, AFAICT.
So I am curious to know in what ways you find Fedora better than Ubuntu.
For me, Ubuntu has too many old packages, so it's too unchanging. The 6 month span is plenty for stability for me.
To me stability revolves around stuff breaking between updates, or installing packages causing incompatibilities that eventually degrade the system. I had a lot of that with Manjaro.
While Ubuntu has little of that, it's also too safe, too behind. There were so many times I needed a slightly newer version than what Ubuntu offered, so I would need to hunt for PPAs, manually maintain Deb files, or find other means of keeping stuff up to date. My sources.list.d would be littered with extra repos.
Fedora is a lot more up to date, their repositories are a lot more filled out. I found stuff in the repos that is not in the Ubuntu repos. They are usually fairly up to date, or at most x.x.1 behind kind of thing.
* 2 years is too old. Might be stable but outdated.
* I have had no problems with proprietary drivers. Most of my machines are amd GPUs, but I have a Nvidia 2070 laptop that works fine. Just installed from dnf and it works.
* I haven't hit any 3rd party driver needs. Printers, PC components, accessories. They all work fine without third party drivers. But it could also be because Fedora has a more up to date kernel.
Anyways, I value a balance of up to date software, stability, and just getting out of the way. Which Fedora, especially Fedora 36 that I'm using, does better than Ubuntu and it's derivatives do.
I will say, I just recently switched to Fedora after last trying it many years ago and hating it. I had a bit of hate for the RPM world since old Red Hat Linux days before I made the jump to Ubuntu. So it might be a honeymoom phase, but I'm so much happier with Fedora than the Debian based ecosystem.
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 also tried kubuntu starting out because i wanted a plasma desktop but found it a bit janky defaults wise. I settled on Manjaro KDE tho. Much nicer defaults, much more software available after checking some boxes in the software centre and choosing the nvidia drivers was relatively easy. (a neat menu to choose between the various options of open source or nvidias own stuff)
That said I think it's still a fine distro to explore for folks new to Linux.
All very, very solid.
I gave Pop_OS a try because I wanted a simple tiling window manager. It does all I want.
The only thing I don't like is the color theme. I know it's a matter of taste but Pop_OS is by far the ugliest out there. Also the default backgrounds. Or the stacking window bar. I wonder what other users are thinking ...
Otherwise is seems very awesome so far. I don't understand the complains regarding the Pop Shop. I think it's actually pretty good. E.g. I can choose to install VS Code from Flathub or as deb Package. That's nice.
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...
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.
They do have a fix (you can switch to dev branch) or wait for it to be released next Tuesday: https://github.com/prisma/prisma/issues/11356#issuecomment-1...
I normally wait at least a month :facepalm: Might want to wait a week or so before updating.
> apt install libpam-fprintd
Settings > Users > Fingerprint Login
kernel 5.16, pop_os 21.10, gnome 40.4.0
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.
Why removing it?
AFAIK no other Arm machines are supported.
