Oh yes, that's my opinion. They are biased because they see only the defects, I'm biased because it works well enough for me (and many people I have spoken to about this who run MacOS) on MacOS.
Add to that the implicit assumption that it's good enough which is encoded in Apple's decision to include it at all.
one of the founders of Elementary worked at System76 until recently, and worked on designing Pop!. Pop! shares some components with Elementary including the "app store." (his blog about it: https://medium.com/@cassidyjames/a-new-chapter-af85f4e64179)
I agree with other posters that Fractional Scaling in 19.04 is useless. It is useless in particular if you want to have one (bigger) monitor at 100% and the laptop monitor at 125%, a configuration that works particularly well in Windows.
But my argument is that FS is not hardware accelerated, it overheats the laptop and even then makes everything run extremely slowly. You can't watch a Youtube video in any of the screens, it becomes a PowerPoint slideshow.
Just played around with it temporarily on Linux, to see if it'd work: use the next integer step for scaling UI, then downsample the result to match the display's actual resolution.
This worked by enabling Virtual Super Resolution for an AMD card on Windows, and an equivalent looking result could be achieved with xrandr incantations. Sadly, the mouse ended up being confined to a subsection of the screen, which was a bug, but that should be fixed now: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/8...
I have been using PopOS on my secondary, private laptop for two years. I installed it on a whim, and it just works for me. Nothing spectacular, just polished. Always been happy with it.
Great picture post. I've been curious about Pop for a while and I've had similar frustrations to what you mention. I also appreciate the mention that it works better outside a VM, I'll skip that.
I recently installed CentOS 7.7 onto a Dell Latitude 5290 (Dell's equivalent of the ThinkPad x280) and found everything (audio, suspend wake, wifi, caméra, nvme) just works, and it gets twice the battery life as on Windows 10.
I'm happy to see really nice marketing on Linux as a desktop OS but it seems over the top these days.
Many things happen in the Linux kernel. It doesn't matter which distro you use as long as the kernel supports your hardware. Lots of distros have taken credit for things that happen outside of what they do.
Can you expand on your answer, please. I haven’t been following Linux kernel updates and wondering if you’re implying that they did a better job at supporting hardware or was there an organized push to support more hardware?
Also, just out of curiosity, did additional hardware support take away from other areas of development or was this just natural since more Linux kernel devs just use different hardware and saw direct benefit?
A distribution like Ubuntu, Debian, Pop!_OS, Fedora, etc., is a collection of programs from many, many other projects and places. Almost every distribution configures things a slightly different way, but almost any other distribution can be configured that same way.
Distros include a unique set of packages, but after installation you can remove what you don't want and add what you do.
The single biggest factor in terms of sheer compatibility with your hardware is the Linux kernel, and every distribution has one. Some are older than others. Some projects remove things from the kernel and recompile. Others add things.
But by and large, the Linux kernel is the same from distro to distro. Some ship newer kernels, to be sure, and some ship older ones. The Linux kernel developers maintain a few different kernels at the same time, some older with security patches, some newer with the latest features and drivers.
Fedora ships new kernels all the time. If you have new hardware and have parts that are not working so great, new kernels will often solve your problems. It's not the distributions doing this, it's the kernel team.
If you have old, stable hardware that works great with an old kernel, you might want to run something like Debian or CentOS -- if you like that sort of thing.
Fedora or Arch are both great ways to get new hardware working its best, but that's because the Linux kernel developers are doing this work at the kernel level, and these distributions pick up new kernels very soon after they are released.
If distro developers contribute back to the Linux kernel -- and many do, from Ubuntu and Fedora for sure, but for others, too -- everybody benefits from those improvements when a new kernel is released for the use of all distributions that want to package it.
So why is it so many programs support/recommend Ubuntu rather than generic Linux? Is it primarily the testing environment that the devs use and the packaging formats the different distros use? I ask because I’m deciding between fedora and some Ubuntu flavour for my next OS and have used Ubuntu for the last 2 years
It all comes down to preference, including what works for your hardware and your use case(s).
Before GNOME 3, Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora all used GNOME 2, and they were more alike than different. I'd say the same is true today with these three and GNOME 3, though Ubuntu skins it somewhat differently.
Testing environment does play a part. Different distros do sometimes use different paths for shared libraries and configs and such. They also sometimes have different versions of libraries in their repos. The programs may be written in a way that don't take this into account and may use an incompatible library or try and look for things in the wrong places.
Linux is just a shell [0], all the distos add their own GUI + specific mods.
I’m guessing Ubuntu is recommended because it’s most widely available or has the least amount of “under the hood” mods that make others more challenging.
Most hardware these day is designed for Linux first, then ported to Windows. Linux has a dominant market share in servers, IoT and mobile. While the Android kernel (and it's "drivers") isn't really Linux anymore, it usually doesn't matter much. The driver will exist and they will be implemented by the manufacturer (most of the time) or RedHat/IBM. If a chip (like wireless) has any use outside of laptops, then it's going to have some kind of support.
Lenovo, Dell, Huawei and HP sell laptops with Linux pre-installed and supported.
The cloud and devices of the future are running Linux. Accelerate your productivity by developing on the same platform that you deploy to. Your tools and programming languages are supported natively and only a command away.
??? I scrolled all the way down and I'm still not sure what the heck is this supposed to be. The selling points are window snapping, workspaces, and... a script to install tensorflow? It's all so bizarre.
We’re focusing on you in a different way than anyone else. Our approach centers on user testing and careful analysis with the singular goal of delivering the most productive and gorgeous platform for developing your next creation. It’s not just about making the easiest tool, it’s about making the best tool. And we’re just getting started.
Nope, still not making sense.
Discover what’s possible at the cross-roads of IOT and AI.
Took me a while to figure out it was a fork of Ubuntu. Does System76 maintain its own aptitude repos? What custom software does it come with (if any)? What architectures does it support? What is the default desktop environment? There's no detail anywhere. No screenshots either.
Made the jump from OSX and for scientific users who don't to endlessly chase a working laptop setup PopOS and it's nvidia driver support (on a thinkpad) has been fantastic, highly recommend as well.
I have found this to be a great option for local deep learning. Painless install of nVidia drivers, CUDA, tensorflow, etc. Also works well for playing games through Steam.
No real indictment on the quality of the OS nor on the effort that people have put into the project, but why, oh why, did they pick a name which has two different special characters in it?
It looks like they're trying hard to push this OS but they seem to have hurt their chances of SEO by creating a name which is both unpronouncable (pop exclamation mark underscore OS) and unsearchable.
as a programmer, I really wish they're was a google setting that respected special characters. in general the algorithm seems to throw them all out discriminately. perhaps they're not indexed at all, for performance reasons?
it's something of a trend in music, to have special characters in the artist's name. especially with "underground" acts, it's almost like the more unpronounceable or SEO-able the name is, the cooler you are.
at any rate, Yahoo! worked out ok, until it didn't.
Is it me or is it so weird that this "OS" (Linux distro) made by a laptop seller (admittedly, with a nerd clientele in mind) has for top selling point bundling a tool to manage your tensorflow installation?
Also mentions of blockchain and IoT make this page look like a buzzword bingo.
The cloud and devices of the future are running Linux. Accelerate your productivity by developing on the same platform that you deploy to. Your tools and programming languages are supported natively and only a command away.
???
I scrolled all the way down and I'm still not sure what the heck is this supposed to be. The selling points are window snapping, workspaces, and... a script to install tensorflow? It's all so bizarre.
> The feedback from power users has been amazing - I’ll agree with the popular slogan for Pop!_OS as “the best OS for developers” wholeheartedly. I can install it and start working. No need to install Nvidia drivers, worry about LUKS disk encryption or customizing my desktop at all. It’s perfect, and I am faster than on Pop!_OS for general productivity than on Windows (and a LOT faster than on macOS).
Oh come on. I will never understand this. For your desktop, surely you can afford to spend an hour configuring your system that should work for over a decade. I lost it at installing NVIDIA drivers, is it that difficult or time-consuming or what the heck? :D As far as full disk encryption goes, I would rather do it manually using Arch's wiki than trust someone else with it, especially because there are MANY ways to do it, and they probably had no plausible deniability in mind, which is a nope for anyone who is serious about it. There are lots of different layouts, parameters, and so on. But OK, for people who cannot install NVIDIA drivers or are not willing to spend a minute doing that, then yeah, sure, why not...
Why would I spend an hour configuring a machine when I don't have to? I don't spend an hour fiddling with a car before it's usable for me. Why should a computer be different?
Why would I want plausible deniability with my encryption? I'm a developer, not a cia agent. I need to keep my company's code safe from random strangers, not governments.
How about this phrase: "one size does not fit all"? Do you use the default configurations for all of your software as well? If not, why not, and how does the reasoning not apply to the rest of the computer?
I do what most people do: Look for something that covers as many of my use cases as possible. The less customization I have to do, the better.
What I'm hoping is that this OS lives up to its promise to cater to the 80% first, which will likely mean that I need to do little-to-no customization, which means less things to maintain myself, which means more time to do actually valuable things. That's what I used to like about MacOS in the days of Mountain Lion.
I switched from a Mac to a Thinkpad running Pop a bit over a year ago.
I miss the Mac trackpad and gestures. I miss the trackpad size and the surface itself. Wiring up libinput-gestures helps some things but you still don't get things like pinch to zoom in Chrome, for example, and the overall experience is not nearly as polished.
I miss Mac OS HiDPI support as well. Fractional scaling helps a bit, but switching from HiDPI to LoDPI and vice-versa (docking/undocking) can leave some apps scaled incorrectly, make a mess of your desktop, and I haven't been able to get a mixed configuration working where only my laptop monitor is scaled while my external display is not. I end up running this 1440p laptop screen at 1600x900 or 1920x1080 instead just to forgo the headache.
The VPN clients we use at work were much more pleasant to use on macOS. We have the option of using one of two different OpenVPN solutions as alternatives, and they're fine, but again, the polish isn't there (little things like automatically reconnecting to the VPN without my intervention would be nice).
I can't really think of anything else I'm really missing these days, though. Things I explicitly DON'T miss: Docker on Mac is a poor experience compared to natively running on Linux... Having a real Linux userspace by default is SO much more pleasant than dealing with Homebrew (which is great if you absolutely need it but I'm happier not having to deal with it at all anymore). I don't miss the Mac keyboard and touchbar. I don't miss troubleshooting things on macOS... it is incredibly opaque in comparison.
Overall, I don't think I'll be switching back any time soon, but would love to see more attention to the overall fit and finish as far as the desktop experience goes.
It's much improved by 19.10 on my machine, which IIRC went from libinput 1.12 to 1.14. The thumb detection (which was wrong just often enough to be torture) in Pop 19.04 is pretty solid in 19.10.
But then again I don't use anything fancy beyond one- or two-finger gestures. If you want all the fancy gestures, I can't really say much about that.
I moved from Mac to Pop (on a Dell XPS 9750 w/ 4k screen) about 3 months ago. Honestly the OS has been pretty much fine. When I installed it was on Pop 19.04, and I had to manually update to kernel 5.3 in order to get some hardware support, but now that kernel is included in Pop 19.10.
I find the contacts/calendars/mail programs to be overall less functional than Mac OS. Not terrible, but it is taking some time to learn the sharp edges to avoid. Geary is their default mail client, but it doesn't support a unified inbox, and I have a lot of email accounts, so I bounced between a bunch of other clients before finally settling on Evolution. Evolution feels like a bad Windows business suite from the late 90s, but the fact is that it has the functionality I need, and I think I can learn to avoid its oddities.
Besides that, everything about it is very familiar to a mac convert. You can see clear areas where strong inspiration was taken from the Mac. It's honestly breathtakingly good, and it's free. I haven't looked back.
Overall, I'd say you should pick up a System 76 Laptop and give it a go. If the Darter Pro had been around when I was switching, I'd certainly have bought that.
I'm actually currently using both at the same time on different laptops.
The biggest thing I miss -- font rendering. Font rendering is all messed up in linux. It's painful to read pdfs, emails, browse the web. I've tried all sorts of configuration options and it's still broken. Really, it grates me. Things just look off.
On Pop! (old thinkpad), typing gives me joy, and I live in the terminal / use vimium browser bindings / snap windows around. I prefer this machine for editing code / hacking.
On Mac, swiping around is frictionless. I use hot corners, gestures, and have trackpad sensitivity at the highest. No need for vim outside of editing code, and I default to GUI workflows. The screen is much better, and prefer watching videos.
My VPN setup and all that jazz is just as easy on either machine.
> On Pop! (old thinkpad), typing gives me joy, and I live in the terminal / use vimium browser bindings / snap windows around. I prefer this machine for editing code / hacking.
Same. It's extremely satisfying for keyboard-centric workflow.
Snappier UI and more stability. Has what I need for web dev.
Starbucks wifi did not work out the box but summoning the correct incantation was easy enough. Never completely migrated over (music, photos, keychain) because of laziness. Miss using voice commands on one device and having it sync data with the rest of my devices (Apple TV, Mac, and iPhone). Ideally, I would replace all my devices so I could regain this functionality. Recently came back to Mac OS for work. After about a month, I'm finding myself using my System76 Lemur more and more.
Keyboard seems reliable. The keys are softer than those of an old Macbook, but have slightly more travel and resistance than those of a magic keyboard. The clickity clackity feel is satisfying.
Haven't thought of or used the touchpad much. Limited gestures, adequate size. I don't use it much.
Battery life feels comparable to that of the 2012-2015 Macbook Pros I've used. Can code, browse, and listen to music for maybe 4 hours a charge, and it recharges quickly.
I switched recently and I love it. Clean interface, and some good tweaks on top of Ubuntu.
Main reason for switching was better docker support/performance. Don’t really miss anything.
Some say Pop is the best for HiDPI screens, but personally I’ve disabled the entire HiDPI Daemon, with a triple monitor setup it was really buggy and slow so I decided to just take the shortcut and change the resolution of my laptop screen to make it readable.
just popping in to say thank you to the dev team if youre seeing this. pop os is slick. i ditched win10 for it and it gives me a hope for the linux desktop i havent felt since 1999!
I just switched to pop from Windows 2 weeks ago. i had been trying out various distros on another laptop over the last few years but I would only mess around for a few days and then go back to windows.
switching over completely has worked out a lot better because it is forcing me to learn a lot faster.
having Windows running in a vm is a lot better for my mental health as well. I don't have to worry about it taking control over my computer at random hours to do some updates
I felt the same way but I love it these days, I just used it wrong for a long time. It's very opinionated and you kind of have to adjust to the workflow. It makes more sense to treat it more like a tiling window manager than a traditional UI and use the keyboard extensively.
I've reconfigured switching between workspaces to simpler hotkeys and together with the overview you can keep a lot of stuff open and navigate without things feeling cluttered.
I havnt used ubuntu in years so I'm not sure how they compare, but i think pop has different keyboard shortcuts, has nvidia drivers included, it uses a different app store gui, has a better/easier install walk-through with an option for full disk encryption.
its basically just a lot if small things that make it easier to use right out of the box. that's what it seems like to me anyway
Recently tried installing Ubuntu 19.04. The ISO thumb drive didn't work. Don't remember the details, but I tried nomodeset and some other usual(!) tricks. After 30 minutes I decided to just give Pop a whirl even though it's not as popular as Ubuntu. Worked with no fuss. That's the best argument I can think of. It's Pop OS for me from here on.
I’ve never had to try “usual” tricks to get Ubuntu installed, and I’ve installed it many times in the last 12 years. In fact, I’ve been installing Linux for around 18 years total and the instal has always been pretty smooth from what I can remember.
I understand the gripes of people that say Linux doesn’t work out of the box and requires constant tweaking, but if you’re having usual problems even getting it installed, I’m curious what you’re doing during the install.
No no, I'm not doing anything weird during the install, I'm having issues getting to the install. Self-built desktop with (in this case) AMD CPU and GPU, but nothing special.
What is it with Desktop oriented Linux and the disgusting default brown/grey UI?
Dear Ubuntu, you're not doing anyone a favour by having such a gross color as the default. I can guarantee a lot of Mac + Windows users looking to switch see that gross color and discard Linux as a whole because of it. Remember, when regular users ask what Linux to pick, or google it, the first one to show up is usually Ubuntu. (These aren't technical people I'm talking about, they probably don't know or don't care that you can change the colors).
How about a clean white, like OSX? or sleek, neat Black?
zorin has a whiter than white ui and its the distro i always recommend zorin for windows users instead of ubuntu because it's laid out similar to windows.
the first time I tried out ubuntu i kept clicking the right side of the window for the X and minimise buttons and lasted maybe half and hour then switched to mint
I get that Pop!_OS is nice, but Ubuntu 19.10 is super polished out of the box as well. Even though System76 is arguing it is much more than just a reskinned Ubuntu, my final verdict is that it is just a reskinned Ubuntu.
Styling it “Pop!_OS” seems like a bad idea if they want wide adoption. Should I type it like that every time? Or maybe omit the explanation mark, as in the HN submission title? Or just type it the same way as I am (presumably) supposed to pronounce it, “Pop OS”?
I bet all three variants will be used regularly (and probably other, erroneous ones like “Pop_OS!” and “Pop_!OS”). What is the point in making a name ambiguous and difficult to get right? Why not just call it Pop OS?
This is a one-line apt/aptitude installation for TensorFlow, PyTorch, CUDA, cuDNN, etc. When NVIDIA releases a new version of CUDA, you can simply apt-get upgrade to the latest version.
Do you support the 19.10 release? The inability to compile or package every version and variant of TF, and GCC9 conflicts with both the CUDA SDK and Tensorflow, is precisely why we created Tensorman.
Lambda Stack supports 16.04 and 18.04 at the moment.
It's value prop is to enable people to easily install TensorFlow / PyTorch and their dependencies in a container-less fashion. Though it doesn't provide the isolation of containers.
What I've learned from talking to customers is that many people don't care that much about handling multiple versions of the same framework. I wouldn't be surprised if you find that, like Lambda Stack, people are mainly using this product to easily get started with TensorFlow/Pytorch.
Now that TensorFlow 2.0 is out, we will see a much more stable API. People won't have to change their code if TensorFlow bumps up a dependency version. For many, this will reduce the impetus for moving to containers.
Install of PyTorch and CUDA is literally one line in anaconda. I don't remember what I did for tensorflow, but I have it up and running and I am quite the computer phillistine so it could not have been much harder.
Maybe the second part is more of a value prop or good point of focus?
You gotta cut the Creative Cloud addiction. Unless you're a full-time designer (especially if working in print or something), alternative tools exist, and it's about figuring out how to move and work in them.
No, GIMP isn't in the conversation.
People complain about web tech, but I've found that it's honestly really the best bet for new design technology. Figma et all are good enough for most stuff, many have PSD support, and better collaboration stories on top of all that.
My two cents, at least. I could be wrong, but this is what I'm trying to do - my logic became "if I'm gonna pay monthly for this shit, why am I paying Adobe?". They're not even truly native on macOS and it's run worse for me with each update.
I've tried this though. The tools are just essential though :/ Figma in the browser is great for most things but you can't draw well in it. Inkscape takes extra effort. But animating svg for out put or making high rez images to output for 2x/3x? That's the difficult part.
I just wish Adobe would listen. You're dead right on the macOS point and here I am running windows nowadays.
I get what you’re saying in terms of Photoshop and Illustrator, but what about After Effects (and by extension Adobe Media Encoder)? I love web tech, but I have never seen an application come close to the power I get in there.
Switching year ago away from Lightroom, I can do so much photo editing/retouching in RAW that darktable has pretty much eliminated my need for Photoshop/GIMP.
Hopefully this means navi is fully supported... already drained enough hours trying to get things all working. Wound up reverting to the last Ubuntu LTS.
Mint feels more like Windows (but better) with task bar and start menu. Pop is more like Mac with dock and app launcher, but a little less polish. I had to use some Gnome extensions on Pop make it how I like it (for example, to have the dock locked on screen).
On a newer hardware, I'd go with Pop because it's more up-to-date with drivers (esp. nvidia) and linux kernel. In my case, linux kernel version did matter for me because I had a weird start-up issue that was fixed in latest kernels.
In my experience it was slightly better, but then most of my problems with Mint were because of Cinnamon. Not sure if drivers or just Cinnamon’s compositor, but Cinnamon would become really choppy at times. Pop is smooth and painless to install. I ended up moving to Manjaro and Plasma eventually, but I’d recommend.
It's cpu vsync. It sucks. It's the only thing I change on Mint.
I install my graphics drivers (nvidia), go to the nvidia settings control panel, turn on full composition (run the desktop through the gpu) which enables vsync on the graphics card. I then go into general (settings) and set vsync to none, disabling cpu vsync. This makes Mint as smooth as butter. It also improves youtube playback quite a bit.
Oh, that makes sense. It definitely affects Plasma to a certain extent too. The default compositor uses OpenGL 2.0 and I could feel some amount of subperceptual lag that annoyed the crap of me after a bit. Switched to XRender and things have been great since.
I'm not a power user. But I've been using Linux as my main desktop UI, usually Ubuntu, for the past dozen years or more. And I absolutely love PopOS on my system76 machine. It works flawlessly.
Who's arguing? It's top level comment on a hn submission. Occasionally people post their opinions. Who am I arguing with? I didn't realize us vs them mindset is compulsory here.
> And no I'm not using a OS where just typing the OS name is dependent on keyboard layout. WTF is wrong with you people? Thats insane. No
That seems like a negative response to an implied suggestion. Taken together, and considering your tone, I think it's fair to call the suggestion and your response an argument, and it's understandable that one would question with whom you are arguing.
Maybe you should re-read the comment. It reads as if you’re angry about something with little to no context as to what point you’re trying to make. Whatever works for you, I suppose.
Especially if you have 4K monitors or a 3K/4K mix where the monitors need a different DPI set.
PopOS uses a system to manage the scaling very well. https://support.system76.com/articles/hidpi-multi-monitor/
The closest comparison I've seen elsewhere is fractional scaling in Gnome 3.32+: https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/FracionalScaling
If you have a configuration / workflow for HiDPI on Linux, it'd be nice to see if there were other options / any other things out there.