Pop Shop is kinda slow. COSMIC Store is part of Pop OS's new COSMIC Desktop Environment (DE). Everything is just a lot faster. It's an alpha so there are a couple of rough edges, but it's great overall.
Speaking of, get hyped for COSMIC. It's a DE written in Rust. It's not quite as complete as GNOME, but hopefully it will have better performance than the current GNOME mod that forms Pop's UI.
Click the windowing mode icon (far left of the icons in the top right) and switch that bad boy to tiled windowing mode. Tiled windows will feel odd for a couple of days, but once you switch back to free-floating windows you’ll realize why I’m recommending tiled.
Look up the PopOS keyboard shortcuts for moving tiled windows around the desktop and workspaces. It’s a game-changing way to use your computer.
PopOS has been my daily driver for a year. Hope you enjoy it as much as I do!
Install steam and whatever gaming things you have and give it a proper spin. I also added some gnome extensions for system usage. Besides that, pop is very simple.
Yeah, now go crazy trying shit you probably should not be trying. From my perspective, that's the best perk of any Linux distro. Evidently, backup first.
I’ve installed Pop!_OS on many machines over the years, and my standard process is:
Install PopOS
rare for PopOS, but, depending on specialized hardware (some legacy Nvidia cards), a little driver rejiggering might be called for. Or a weird network printer setup that CUPS doesn’t like.
set up my custom zsh/bash profile for the terminal
enable firewall
configure SSH and whichever remote management tools I need (I happen to deploy remote machines frequently)
sudo apt install gnome-tweaks & a few other UI tweaking tools (obviously, this step will no longer exist soon)
tweak UI/UX
search through gnome extensions website for extension I want to install. There’s usually a Top 10 or Top 20 gnome extensions list you can google (eg: “best gnome extensions 2024”)
make sure I have all appropriate media codecs installed and updated.
set up pip-/pip3-installer.
After that, it’s setting up/configuring whatever software that particular machine needs.
Edit: there’s probably a lot that I’ve skipped/missed, and a lot that others will do along their way through these steps. This is just a basic outline of some of my post-install processes (developed over time), and I hope this answers your question.
Also, you can google for post-install guides for Ubuntu and they’ll largely be applicable to PopOS since it’s based on Ubuntu.
I really don't get some of these comments. I've been using popos on and off since it came out. I would check out gnome extensions to see if anything sticks out to you as being useful for your use case. I would also go into your settings and update your recovery partition. This is also the place to refresh your PC if you need in the future which has been a must-have for me.