Thoughts on Pop!_OS

After using an Ubuntu-based distro¹ for about a year, I decided to distro-hopped again in the past two months. The machine that I’ve been doing this is quite old and showing signs of failing drive and other internal components. Sadly, the Wi-Fi and bluetooth card died and accessing the internet from my phone using USB tethering is quite a hassle too.

Due to a now faulty machine, I decided to get a replacement. Of course it came with Windows as it’s operating system. I installed all the necessary updates on it and after setting it up, Windows is taking 2 GB of RAM at idle. Nice.

So after giving Windows a fair use (1 hour), I immediately replaced it with Debian. I used Openbox as my window manager and the experience is a breeze. The RAM usage as expected is pretty low at around 250 to 290MB. After 3 days of playing around with this new acquired machine and Debian, I read about the new release of Pop!_OS. I’ve heard about this project before but I really haven’t taken a deep look at it since I assumed it is just another Ubuntu-based distro. What caught my attention is their Pop Shell implementation. It is basically a GNOME extension which adds a tiling-window functionality on top of GNOME. Also, the project supports a wide range of hardware out of the box, and the easy setup of having graphics card drivers. These made my try out the iso and will force me to use GNOME for the first time again in 4 years. In the end, I replaced Debian with Pop.

I’ve been using it for about a week now and so far, I’m impressed. GNOME seems to be faster now, and I’m looking to use it for a quite a while. All hardware works out of the box, and what surprised me is that my machine runs cooler now compared to my setup in Debian. The Pop shell is good, although I prefer floating windows for now on this desktop environment. I’m monitoring the progress though on their GitHub page. I’m having fun now using this distro.

So far, my distro hopping came to a temporary end for this past week. I now have time for other things.