I've been using Pop!_OS (and only it) for about 3 years now because Windows messed itself up on one of my laptops and I didn't feel like reinstalling it. During those 3 years, Nvidia on my two laptops has "just worked" with absolutely zero broken upgrades I can remember. I'm not trying to install a bunch of GNOME plugins to make it usable because that's already said and done out of the box. There are zero annoying things running in the background sucking up all my processor time. So, overall, I haven't snoozed more from a Linux distro, in contrast to trying to set up Arch on one of my SBCs.
Because of that, Pop will be the ONLY thing I'm installing on my computers for the foreseeable future. :) I wish all Linux distros were as boring as this.
I know right, a real snooze fest! Pop!_OS is so boring I installed it on all my business machines. I've had a good five years of boring old rock-solid performance. With Pop!_OS on seven machines I feel confident that my evenings and weekends will be relaxing, unlike my experiences with many other distros. I get tired, stressed and burned out on operating systems that you are continually fixing and configuring when you're trying to get things done. I'd even go so far as to say Pop!_OS is good for your health. It can lower your blood pressure and has been proven to stimulate your creative flow. The zen-like peace of mind that one gets from using Pop!_OS should be registered with the FDA. It's like an opioid mixed with a cortisol blocker!
I've heard good things about Pop. Great video driver support (it's bundled in the install) and it just works out of the box . Fire up Steam and play some games.
I've been using Pop for a few months and I love it.
My main complaint with windows is that all the apps were small icons and hidden away behind menus, while Pop does hide it's apps icons behind a single button, the window pops up directly in my view and I can see every app I have installed. And I hope that will never go away.
I've got a laptop with pop and windows with dual boot, I realized when I play Minecraft on pop using the Nvidia the laptop gets like really really hot compared to playing Minecraft on windows (using Nvidia). Do you have the same experience?
Thanks for this post. I exactly feel the same. It is so boring that some months ago, I played around with some other distros, simply because Pop!_OS ist the first distro I am using since switching from Mac and I was not sure what I am missing.. Long story short: I deleted all other distros, now nowing, how genious many desicions of the Pop!_OS team are (especially the Gnome/X11 decision for fractual scaling) and how good it is working out of the box while looking modern in the same time (in contrary to KDE where you probably need weeks to make it nice).
It’s been rock solid for me going on 3 years now. I started using pop 20.04 and then upgraded to 22.04 and upgraded my DE from Regolith 1.6 to 2.0 and despite all those rather large major version leaps, I’ve had no issues.
And I’m a remote developer (doing LXC and other systems level development) using this on my work laptop that has to stay functional for my livelihood, so stability is paramount, but also the ability to customize things without it breaking the world.
If I didn’t have a System76 laptop with a dGPU I might just use Ubuntu or Debian because I don’t really utilize most of the pop-specific features (e.g it’s tiling functionality) aside from from the ease of dealing with power management and Nvidia graphics, but it’s still a great distro.
i have a 2017 macbook on which pop won't install (installer crashes). so it runs ubuntu. the experience is maddening compared to my (non-system76) pop box
What I would do clone the backups so that you can have your cake and eat it too, in other words testing your backups' recency while testing their clonability. How old is your SSD?
I'm not sure how you made your backups but Timeshift worked for me in the past. However, I was restoring the same drive, not a new SSD like you're going to do. Good luck
It was the first distro I tried last year and after distro hopping around so much I landed back on it for my laptop.
I do like Garuda (prev installed on laptop) and Cachy OS (currently on desktop) but the incredibly simple and basic experience that is Pop OS is just so much preferable. Thankfully Cachy OS has presented far less issues than something like Manjaro for me.
But assuming COSMIC turns out to be a great desktop environment and I can get comparable stability in performance on my gaming PC - I might switch my desktop back to PopOS.