Pop!_OS

Let eyecatching-distro aficionado Jonni Bidwell show you the ropes of System76’s bespoke Linux flavour.

There have been a few notable efforts to humanise Linux. Today we’d say – and feel free to disagree – that Linux Mint and elementary OS are the most friendly-to-use and all-purpose distros out there. These are of course indebted to Ubuntu for providing a solid foundation and superlative package selection – which in turn owes something to Debian. But it’s also arguable that much of this popularity is, or at least was, a result of dissatisfaction with Ubuntu’s desktop.

People who didn’t like Unity loved Cinnamon, and the people who did like Unity didn’t like GNOME 3 (which Ubuntu has used since 17.10). Pantheon, the macOS-like desktop of elementary OS, is attractive not just to fans of fruit-based fashion companies, but to anyone frustrated with over complicated configuration, inconsistently styled applications and ugly fonts. Of course, Windows 10 drives a steady trickle of users to Linux too, as the Start menu begins to resemble some sort of ever growing billboard farm, and updates constantly get in your way.

Hardware compatibility is an important concern too. Today, distros have to cater to all kinds of new-fangled configurations: HiDPI fractional scaling, multi-monitor and hybrid GPU setups, disk encryption. Users want easy access to the latest software, and developers want easy access to their preferred development tools. Providing such features is especially important if you’re a manufacturer of Linux systems like Colorado-based System76, and that is why it developed the mysteriously punctuated Pop!_OS.