Pop!_OS

Reader supplied reviews for Pop!_OS Average rating 8.1 from 250 review(s) Please specify which version of the distribtion you are reviewing. Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on Pop!_OS? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 24.04-alpha522.0421.1021.0420.1020.0419.1019.0418.1018.0417.10 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 22.04 Rating: 8 Date: 2025-02-09 Votes: 2 Pop! is a complete distribution. After installation and reboot, it is possible to get going without any further configuration. The defaults are, indeed, sane defaults. Pop! offers a heavily modified GNOME called COSMIC, including desktop icons, a dock with a lot of configuration allowed and a tabbed Show Applications. Show Applications, in particular, is far superior to GNOME's offering as it is less quirky - for example, applications are sorted alphabetically without having to install an extension to do so. The big new feature of Pop! is automatic window tiling. It is switched off by default but, once switched on and used for a bit, it is sensational. There is nothing like it in Windows/MacOS and nothing as easy to set up or use in Linux. In fact, the whole way of managing the screen is so intuitive and obvious once used it it is surprising that there are so few attempts at tiling and those that exist are not the mainstream flavours of distributions. There are a number of other thoughtful features, such as firmware updates built in, a recovery partition built in, USB flashing built in (Popsicle) and an app store (Pop! Shop) which is less clumsy than most and supports DEB files and flatpaks. I note some reviews about "old" and "unmaintained". Well, Pop! is based on Ubuntu LTS 22.04, which is supported until 2027. It uses GNOME 42 but, really, the differences between that and the current version, 47, are mostly cosmetic, particularly in what feels like the endless shuffling around of options in the file manager (Nautilus). If required newer versions of GNOME apps can be installed via flatpak. More concerning is that the kernel is old and in between LTS versions (6.9.3; the LTSs are 6.6.x and 6.12.x). However, with three commands I switched to the xanmod kernel, which is currently at 6.12.13. The "old" is because Pop! took a very radical step in developing its own desktop environment, COSMIC, rather than put up with GNOME's often arbitrary and increasing constraints on what modifications could be made to vanilla GNOME. By definition that takes a long time; it is certain that version 1 of "new COSMIC" will be good but not as feature-rich as "old COSMIC" as reviewed here, but the alpha releases are very promising. The rating is tricky. I give 8 because Pop! has clearly done all it can with GNOME and produced a remarkably effective take, with the automatic window tiling worth the price of admission on its own, but there will be a step to get over between "old COSMIC" and "new COSMIC". Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 22.04 Rating: 4 Date: 2025-02-02 Votes: 1 Practically unmaintained and unusable in its current state. The only hope for Pop!_OS users is that system76 may drop 24.04 within their lifetimes and fix so so many of the issues with this 3-year-old distro release which is just running off of old buggy software with no patches. Stayed on it for 3 years and had to swap to something more maintained because it was getting harder and harder to use it as my daily driver. Hopefully 24.04 will release with COSMIC being usable out of the box within a reasonable amount of time and progress on it is looking promising but system76 ditching their community to go work on an entirely new DE without even bothering to still update what people were stuck on was a horrible choice. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 22.04 Rating: 9 Date: 2025-01-30 Votes: 1 Une tres bonne distribution Linux sous enviironnement Gnome pour mon Mac Mini 2012 ( 16 GB Ram ). Je l'utilise sur un disque Externe OWC en USB 3. La distribution est tres stable et fluide dans son usage. Merci au developeurs pour cette distribution tres agreable. Un grand merci. Philippe A very good Linux distribution under the Gnome environment for my Mac Mini 2012 ( 16 GB Ram ). I'm using it on an external OWC USB 3 drive. The distribution is very stable and smooth to use. Thanks to the developers for this very pleasant distro. Many thanks. Philippe Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 250 reader reviews of Pop!_OS...