Note: I am not from the Pop team so this has nothing to do with them. I am just a user who wants shit to work and not distro hop every couple of months.

Not trying to invoke a distro war here, but I recently bought a second hand sys76 laptop. The build is ok not fantastic like thinkpads or macs, but i wanted to try out their distro - Pop OS. It runs pretty great, smooth and very snappy. I really like the best of both worlds - tiling vs floating windows.

That said, I see a lot of hate for this distro. Christ Tirus Tech posted multiple videos ditching this OS like it is garbage. Linus Tech Tips had that self owned moment when he installed Pop and crashed it, so not a good marketing for the OS.

I used Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, Arch. Each has its pros and cons but the hostility is nowhere near the ones Pop gets. Did the devs fucked up because they did something stupid to the OS, like Manjaro team when they forgot to renew security certificates?

  • sbeak@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    3·
    3 hours ago

    I personally use EndeavourOS, and yeah, it’s great! I would never recommend it to a beginner starting out with Linux though, since being rolling release some things do occasionally break. It’s not often, but when it does, it can be annoying for a newbie. One example I can remember is when KDE Plasma stopped working around the time it was recently updated (for context, I am using a 2-in-1 touchscreen laptop. That probably had to do with the weird bug), but after a bug fix release it now seems to work fine. I’m fine with that since I like tinkering around with computers though. EndeavourOS also doesn’t come with a graphical app store either, but that’s for the better since installing AUR apps with very low friction is a bad idea (it’s one of the criticisms of Manjaro actually). All of this is fine, as EndeavourOS never claimed to be the most beginner-friendly distro in the first place. As per its site: it’s a minimal and terminal-centric Arch-based distribution. It knows what it is and that’s what I like about it :D

    • another detail, I said it doesn’t market itself as stable (which is true), not that it is inherently instable (which, as you described, is partially false). I do think that rolling release distros can be good if you know what you’re doing, but for a newcomer to Linux, it’s not my first choice. That would probably go to Mint, Fedora, or similar depending on their hardware.
    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
      2·
      3 hours ago

      Personally I prefer rolling releases, because apart from being generally more up to date having all the newest features, I also like to generally only have to fix 1 problem at a time. Where a dist-upgrade for a non rolling release sometimes have more problems at once.
      I feel like I have fewer problems on average with rolling releases.

      • sbeak@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        2·
        2 hours ago

        Fair enough, the great thing about Linux is that there are options out there for everyone’s tastes and preferences! I also run EndeavourOS and love it very much :D