I’ve been using Linux on and off for about 15 years, but was never able to make the leap to using it full-time until PopOS. It’s been painless to use and does everything I need with only minor tweaks. Thank you System76! I can’t wait until the Cosmic DE is released.
(too bad about the name, though…)
I use Linux all over for my server hosting, but not desktop OS. Out of curiosity, what were the things that held you back from using it full time? (Others feel free to share too please)
I will go first - gaming. I do also have a SteamDeck so I am fully aware that there has been lots of advancements there and that is great. For the most part, the games I currently play seem to play just fine on it (and I know some of that could be the Deck more than Linux itself). With all that said, I am still skittish about fully committing as my main desktop OS.
Games seem to be the thing that holds people back. I think it definitely depends on what games you play as my experience has been pretty smooth. A little tinkering … but it’s a new OS so that’s expected. Check out protondb.com to keep an eye on games you play to see what their playability is like.
Having said that … it’s been about 3 weeks and I only needed to boot into Windows for a few hours when Ubisoft Connect got an update and broke proton compatibility. Blizzard is now bringing lots of games to Steam which will also help a ton.
There are definitely sacrifices going to Linux for gaming. I feel like proton and the steam deck are just now opening the door for Linux gaming to be taken somewhat seriously. The more users switch, the more seriously we’ll be taken as customers, I hope anyways. And hopefully those sacrifices will become less and less.
Have you tried dual booting, and trying to switch?
I set up a dual boot with Windows 10 and Mint on my PC. I found that I was sticking with Windows because it was what I knew, but then an update broke the Windows boot files.
The usual repairs didn’t work, so I started using Mint full time while I was looking for solutions that didn’t just want me to reinstall. I realised after the first few days that I wasn’t missing much from Windows, and it was just the Windows only software like Photoshop that was holding me back. I’m looking into switching the last few things over now so that I can go to Mint full time 👍
Not a bad idea. I might do this on my laptop (I have a desktop too for main gaming). My laptop has a dual screen too, so if I try this, I will report back on the experience.
What about PopOS puts it over the edge for full time?
In my case it’s mostly that it works perfectly on laptops without any excessive power consumption or weird sleep-when-closed-lid problems. I still can’t get my fingerprint reader to work, but I can live with that. And it’s loaded with QoL stuff like the window tiling shortcut. But mainly, I just don’t have to fight with it, from installation to everyday use.
How did you like Linux Mint (if you tried it)? I thought that was supposed to be the easy one.
It’s been years since I’ve tried Mint! I remember it working well, but found it too Windows-like. That may seem like a weird criticism since that’s its raison d’etre, but I didn’t want to switch from Windows to get something that doesn’t feel different enough to be an upgrade. Mint is what I’d go for if I were installing Linux on my parents’ computer.
Speaking personally, it’s consistently done a great job of supporting the hardware on the laptops on which I’ve installed it without requiring any special effort on my part. (Ironically this wasn’t true for their own Oryx Pro laptop, but that was more because the laptop itself was barely functional and not because there was anything wrong with PopOS itself.)
I also really like its “Refresh Install” feature which reinstalls the operating system while keeping all of your non-system files in place, which I’ve used in a couple of unfortunate cases to go from a borked unbootable machine to a working machine in under 30 minutes. I mainly use this laptop for gaming so because Steam installs everything in my home directory my downloaded game library was fully preserved by this process.
When I used it, it was the ability to switch window tiling on and off on the fly, and for each of those tiles to have tabs. I’ve switched to another distro but I keep using GNOME because of that specific shell extension.
Do you remember what that extension is called? Switched to fedora but I just can’t seem to find it and didn’t take note of what it was called
Yep, it’s Pop Shell. It’s in the Fedora repos so no jumping through hoops: https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-shell/
At home I started running Linux Mint years ago in a dual boot setup and rarely use the windows partition anymore.
For work I’ve threatened to do the same a few times but never actually got that far.
I think it helps with all the software going cloud based so the reasons of needing windows only apps are slowly disappearing even if that’s another can of worms.
Every day I have to use Windows at work makes me long to get home to Pop OS. It’s so much faster and cleaner. The amount of advertising windows hurls at you, even on Pro, is ridiculous.
Good for you! Pop!_OS is where I got my start as well about a year ago. 12 distros later I’m a happy EndeavourOS user. Learning an arch based system was a bit of a jump from “easy” distros like pop and mint, but it’s significantly snappier and issue free so far, so long as you get handy with the terminal.
Pop is great, but don’t be afraid to branch out and play around at some point, I have as much fun fiddling with my system as I do gaming now.
Endeavour was my second-favourite during my last test drive of various distros but I had some reservations about using an Arch-based distro for my work machine compared to the generally more stable Debian/Ubuntu. I’m also not sure I can live without the PopOS window tiling feature.
I use KDE with EOS and I’d argue that the tiling is better. Super+t opens your tiling layout, you can split your desktop up into a preferred format, split up any way you like, shift+click and drag to pop windows into the tile spaces. I’m sure there’s other hot keys for it I haven’t bothered to learn yet. Pull up a video on it sometime.
