this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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People use Mac and Windows because everything just works and it comes pre-loaded on the system. That can be the case with some Linux distros, but more often than not you'll spend forever troubleshooting because some random bit of hardware on your system is not supported immediately out of the box.
I put Linux Mint on my mom's laptop several years back in an attempt to breathe some new life back into that piece of crap. It's still a piece of shit, but I thankfully haven't had to tinker with it and nothing has broken for her.
The other day I tried installing Pop OS on my laptop after having been away from linux for several years. I was infuriated at how long it took me to fiddle with it and get certain components of my system working. Even then, it randomly boots into a black screen occasionally until I restart it a few times. No idea why.
As an example, when I paired my bluetooth mouse, it had missing functionality for the extra buttons. I tried installing some program that you have to manually configure from the terminal and it just threw errors and broke functionality of the scroll wheel. Found a program with a GUI interface...it had both a flatpack and a .deb available. Tried the .deb and it threw an error and never worked. Tried the flatpack version...still didn't work but this time it no longer told me what the error was (and neither did reinstalling the .deb version)...gave it once and never again so I hope you memorized it. Through some googling I found out that both installations packages were missing some stupid vital and necessary permissions file for some reason. I have absolutely no idea why they were missing the file. It reminded me of the old days when windows was missing some obscure .dll file and I had to download it online. Had to do some more googling to actually figure out what the file was supposed to contain and ended up creating it myself. Finally I got all of the mouse buttons working after all this headache.
If everything works out of the box, you're golden. If you have to configure shit or things break randomly (like the intermittent black screen issue), things can get frustrating real quickly.
To top it all off, I had hoped Pop OS would make my laptop run snappier, but it even feels a bit more sluggish than Windows 10. I'm still trying to give it a chance though because I missed a bit of tinkering now and then and my laptop is starting to show it's age a bit. And the new look of GNOME was interesting (well "new" to me...I used Ubuntu back before they updated GNOME to have this dock thingy).
Edit: For anyone who wishes to comment on the black screen issue...no, I do not have a NVIDIA graphics card.
Pop OS uses archaic software packages. For me Alpine has a good balance between stability and new stuff (no graphical installer though), on the same note my gaming daily driver, Artix, which is based on Arch never broke but that might be due to the fact I installed a lot of my software using nix, cargo and flatpak.
Yeah idk. I was more interested in trying to stick with an Ubuntu-based (or at the very least a Debian-based) OS just because it's easier to search for an issue and have those related distros be the top result.
I remember years back when I first discovered Mint it seemed like the perfect end user focused Linux distro. It worked so much better out of the box than even Ubuntu (which is already very user friendly), with very minimal configuring needed...installing a lot of things out of the box that even Ubuntu didn't do at the time. I was deciding between Mint and Pop OS to try out on my laptop, and ultimately went with Pop OS because of GNOME and because I heard they have a bit better hardware support (altho I don't have an NVIDIA card so that might be moot).
I get that you can install other desktop environments on your system, but if your distro is built with something in mind it seems better to try that first. I also didn't want to necessarily want to jump back into Ubuntu after all these years, because I hear it doesn't run as well as other distros with these new Snaps things. The point would be to make my laptop run better than it is, not worse.
I don't mind a bit of tinkering here and there, but I have no interest in 3l337 h@X0r level distros. The more user friendly and "it just works", the better. I'm not a programmer, nor do I work in IT or anything of the sort. I prefer GUI based programs, not terminal based ones.
POP!_OS does not use archaic packages for system components. It ships with the latest stable kernel, mesa and pipewire (and Steam + Nvidia)
The distribution is just on a feature hiatus until the summer when COSMIC is realeased.