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?
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.
If you have one of the models with their open source firmware installing another DE will ruin firmware updates for you.
If I’d have known what I know now, I wouldn’t have gotten this laptop.
Last update made it stuck on boot splash screen.
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.
People (especially tech influencers) tend to hate beginner-friendly OSes.
I’ve been using Pop for 3+ years on my main rig. Especially with COSMIC, it is fantastic.
Sure, I’ve got Arch on a laptop, and I dabble with other distros periodically. Pop stays on the main rig though. Why? Because I don’t want to update something with a bleeding edge package and break my system. Whatever time I would be spending doing something fun in my off time would then be spent fixing Arch, instead of doing the thing.
Now, back to the influencers: why do they hate Pop / Mint / Ubuntu? Tbh I think there’s just a certain amount of flexing they have to do as influencers, and it’s hard to flex when everything just works.
Not only it blew years ago when LTT tried it for the first time, it was absolute dogshit the second time he tried it recently.
System76 put Beta version of their new desktop into an LTS release. Stable my ass.
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.
Just had an update fry my install and I have to find time now to backup all my data and reinstall and I’m sure there will be some issues with it since I’m using their custom firmware version.
For a $2K laptop I’m pretty pissed off about that and it will be my last one I ever buy from them.
If you install another DE on it you lose the ability to update their custom firmware.
If I’d have known what I know now I would have gotten a Dell or a Framework.
Before that I would have only complained about the terrible keyboard quality and how cartoonishly large they made the mouse pad. Minor gripes.
Edit: realized this isn’t about system 76 computers but popos as a whole. Still, the update fumble is still relevant so I’ll leave it here.
Does anyone else remember windows ME… Out windows 11? All I could think about reading your OS reinstall comments lol.
I used to have to reinstall ME every few months. And 11 had been so shit for me. Just had to reinstall it on a computer due to several issues with patching and rebooting. No amount of dism and sfc was resolving those issues. Like 1 hour of black screen with a cursor after logging in types of issues. So far a reinstall has fixed it. Numerous docking glitches (different machine). Graphics glitches missing icons, explorer freezes and restarts. I’ve seen so many, and they’re not sure to abusing the OS. Just day to day. Microsoft themselves even claimed they will focus on fixing windows 11.
I’m not trying to justify your issues with pop, bury just wanted to highlight windows stuffers too and this is Microsoft.
My Mac I had never faced issues though.
“It’s mainstream now so it’s no longer cool.”
The same hate Ubuntu got when it first came out (and still gets, tbh).
