Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS Released: A Letter From Our Founder
39 points by Jackevansevo
39 points by Jackevansevo
System 76 is one of those orgs that I'm hoping really shines - or, continues to shine! I don't know anyone who works there, I've only ever heard the founder on podcasts, and i don't (yet) own any of their products...and yet, something about the org seems to exude a sense of fuzzy warmth. I know they are a for-profit company and all...but it feels like the kind of company from years ago where there's no BS...i assume i pay for a product/service, and get a product/service, and that's it - no other BS. I'm curious if anyone has experiences with the company - to validate my assumptions?
Secondly, while POPOS is not something i daily drive, i played around with Cosmic, and whoa nelly its nice!!! I wish them well on their release and look forward to playing more with Cosmic!
I've bought a desktop and a laptop from System 76 and they're both pretty excellent, no compromise Linux devices. Their support is friendly as well.
The only thing that would make me switch from my current System 76 laptop is if they release one that's ARM64 based!
Pop OS user here. Happy to drive their stuff daily. There's excess greed these days, but not all for-profit companies are problematic (especially if they stay small to medium sized.) The risk for System76 to forget their core customer base is absolutely there, but for now let's enjoy them as they are!
Pop OS user here. Happy to drive their stuff daily.
Yeah, I'm played with POP OS even before cosmic, but it never stuck with me...Not because there was ever anything wrong with Pop OS...I guess i've mostly been a KDE plasma person, so maybe just a preference sort of thing...but popos has always worked perfectly fine. Of course, cosmic has me tempted to try it for possible future daily driving. ;-)
There's excess greed these days, but not all for-profit companies are problematic (especially if they stay small to medium sized.) The risk for System76 to forget their core customer base is absolutely there, but for now let's enjoy them as they are!
I think you said it best here! Also, not just for system 76, but for all companies, it would be great if they stay small enough to be supportive of me as a consumer, but not so small that they constantly struggle and then feel they need to resort to crappy tactics to stay alive, etc.
Heh, is it 24.04 or 25.12? :)
Jokes aside, my GF chose Pop!_OS for some reason some time ago and she's very happy. I'm plopping 24.04 on my "lab" laptop as I write this to test drive it out.
The question is how long System76 will update 22.04?
Edit: also, Firefox seems to not be a Snap, and I have no snap in my path. I thought 22.04 didn't have it either, but I noticed my GF's laptop seemed to have Snaps, so I was a bit confused.
Edit 2: just tested if for some crazy chance they supported global shortcuts, but no :(
Don't recall an ARM64 version before, perhaps it was mentioned on a roadmap, but it's there now and installs well under UTM/QEMU on M4 Pro Mac. Looks great; I'm enjoying digging into what they've built.
I've owned several system76 machines. I have a very beefy and expensive Thelio with an AMD GPU and NVME drives.
I am a full time programmer but I've never had an interest in building my own PC. The premium I pay for System76 support from Humans has always been worth it.
I'm on my third System76 laptop, and am a happy customer. I wanted a laptop on which Linux would cost me no extra effort, and give me no troubles, and I got what I wanted. The hardware of each generation has been better than the last one. I'm looking forward to upgrading to Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS.
I think at this point if I were them I would’ve waited to rebase on Ubuntu 26.04 and released in a few more months. tho this does give them a few months of fixing issues before that release! I think that’ll be the one I’ll kick the tires on
I’m thinking of leaving Windows soon now that Win10 no longer gets security updates. At this point I’m fairly set on switching to a well-supported immutable distro with a sane desktop environment, which basically means Fedora with KDE (so Kinoite). I’d love to see more adoption of Cosmic in that area beyond the home-grown container images that’ve been put out, since Cosmic seems opinionated and lightweight in a much more thoughtful way than Gnome.
I'm running Kinoite right now as an experiment, having come from Mint. My feeling about desktop linux in general is that no distro is as polished as I would like, but there is a general trend of improvement over time, and Cosmic seems to be part of this trend. Here are a few observations.
With KDE under Kinoite, I don't like the fact that the Plasma shell crashes once every few weeks (it reboots in seconds with no work lost). Complaints about this go back years, and it seems to be related to Qt being written in C++ and not particularly robust. Cosmic has a more solid foundation, being written in Rust, and I'm planning to install Cosmic as an additional desktop once Fedora Cosmic Atomic is updated to the release version of Cosmic, just to see if I like that any better.
With Fedora Atomic in general, there doesn't seem to be anything as nice as the Mint "Software Manager", which is a universal graphical software store that lets you search for and install software of any type, from any source, including flatpak GUI apps, command line tools, and fonts. It has a nice UI; packages have screen shots, user reviews and star ratings. On Fedora Atomic, you separately manage packages depending on their source. Packages installed in your core OS are managed with rpm-ostree, packages (usually CLI commands) installed in containers outside of the core are managed with toolbox or distrobox, and flatpaks are managed separately from that. Fedora flatpaks and flathub flatpaks have to be managed differently, so most people just install Bazaar from flathub as their flatpak manager and then ignore Fedora flatpaks. I've since learned about Aurora and Bazzite, which are positioned as Kinoite with "more sensible defaults" and "batteries included". They use Bazaar and flathub for managing flatpak apps, and Homebrew for managing CLI apps.
I was disappointed that Kinoite 42 didn't notify me when release 43 was available. I had to use arcane CLI commands to discover the 43 release and install it: there's no GUI for this. To be fair, the CLI commands are clearly documented in the Kinoite user manual. I was expecting Kinoite to support automatic background upgrades to new major releases, like my mobile does, but it's not implemented yet. There's an outstanding issue to fix this, and code has been written, so we will get there.
Despite my dysphoria concerning software management on atomic distros, I do not like the Mint upgrade experience, and I feel that atomic distros are the right technical basis for the future. They just need a lot more polish. I really like the idea of a modern Rust-based DE, so I'm hoping that Cosmic will satisfy my needs.
Ideally, Kinoite actually is supposed to provide an upgrade prompt in Discover but for some reason it hasn't been working for everyone:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/discover-in-kinoite-42-doesnt-propose-43-upgrade/170607
I am looking forward to the COSMIC variant of Fedora Atomic maturing, especially integrating updates and upgrades into its store application. Kinoite has been working great for me, but I'm excited about COSMIC.
EDIT: I personally haven't had any issues using GNOME Software and Discover to manage flatpaks from Flathub on Silverblue and Kinoite, respectively. Both offer the option to enable Flathub, and at least Discover let's you disable the Fedora flatpak repository (I only use Flathub). I agree using containers for CLI applications is a bit different, but I haven't had to layer anything with rpm-ostree in years. Even then, I agree it would be great to have that layering better integrated into the GUI software applications.
I heard someone say they were using the Cosmic panel (and other desktop components?) with niri. If that's true, I'm going to have to try it.