I recently just switched to Pop! and it's so crazy how much fun linux is now! I was pulling my hair out at Ubuntu because of things like Snaps, trying to get nvidia to work, and so many weird quirks. (My audio just had a low buzzing noise until I reconfigured Pulse, scaling had to be manually set in a config file, I had to change a few nvidia configs to get my games to play at over 30fps, and no native flatpak integration obviously because of snaps)
But with Pop everything just works! Flatpaks are in the pop shop, the distro had an option with nvidia configured out of the box, it's been the easiest linux setup I've ever had. I need to go deeper into the weeds with Fedora and Arch, but goddamn Pop is going to be my go-to from here on out.
Running this distro on my laptop for its great window manager. Good stuff!
Customized gnome with pop tiling manager iirc. It’s a pretty good mobile experience compared to default gnome.
Pop_OS! Is the one I chose to finally move full time to Linux. I have zero regrets. It's been great
Snap is what finally forced me to explore the vast selection of distros. Mint Linux is working well for me. I do miss Plasma Desktop though.
https://helpdeskgeek.com/linux-tips/how-to-install-kde-plasma-desktop-on-linux-mint/
I'm not a fan of Cinnamon either, but switching is easy.
Snaps is Ubuntu/Canonicals proprietary package format which is mostly considered a worse alternative to flatpak (another package format) with no real advantages on desktops that Canonical is trying to force on users
I started using ubuntu 2 years ago and its great. Just disable snaps. It's like 5 commands (and you have to reinstall Firefox).
You stop snap store from running, disable it from restarting then set apt over snap store as default.
It's not hard. I did it day 1 of using Linux. Plus there's guides a plenty on how to do it.
If you are using Ubuntu and disabling snaps, might as well use something else. Snaps are basically the selling point of Ubuntu and any other distro based on it will provide a better experience if you don't want them.
What about all the other pros of ubuntu?
Off the top of my head,
- their power management is better than any other distro for laptops.
- Their compatibility with WiFi drivers is better than many others, granted that's not exclusive to ubuntu but it is a pro.
- theyre more up to date than debian but stable while actually coming with Wayland support unlike Mint. Timeshift is great tho, good thing it's compatible with ubuntu.
- their community is much larger than many other distro so support is easier to find.
- it's just not a bad distro. There's not a lot of other distros that match its out-of-the-box experience.
Other distros are good. PopOS is good. I chose Ubuntu mostly because it's solid and stable but also because it has a wide community for help. I'm just getting tired of the narrative that ubuntu is totally crippled by its snaps. This is a linux distro, if I don't like something I get to change it, which is actually cool. This isn't windows where I have no control. Also, with snaps gone, I've literally never had a problem I haven't caused. I have the approach of strip out what I don't want. Arch users install what they do want. At the end of the day, we both are exploiting software we want to use to be productive. If I found myself fighting the os (like Mac or Windows) I'd switch but I don't so I won't.
What about all the other pros of ubuntu?
- uses a cool word from the Zulu language
sudo apt purge -y snapd && sudo apt install -y gnome-software-plugin-flatpak && flatpak remote-add flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
For everything else Fedora is looking good. PopOS has potential.
