Have You Used Pop and Ubuntu (and Mint)?

**kschiff** · January 13th, 2020

I really hated Unity and decided first to use Gnome Ubuntu (whatever it was called at the time), eventually went back to Windows 10(for business purposes), and have used Mint for over a year as my daily driver. I've mostly been happy with Mint, but recently ran into strange undiagnosable audio issues that led me to install Pop!_OS 19.10 on to a fast thumb drive (not Live USB) just to live long enough in it and get a feel for actual performance under normal load.

Aside from some minor quirks, I really like it so far.

I'm considering jumping in, replacing Mint on my main SSD and going full bore into Pop. What is keeping me on the fence, is the 5 days that I've been using Pop and I've posted various questions to the Pop subreddit, but also to their Mattermost Chat with very limited action response wise. Obviously Ubuntu's forums are quite active (much larger install base), and perhaps the best thing about Mint is that their forums are really responsive. My point is that in my experience, "community" has helped me a bunch in the 10+ years that I've been using desktop Linux.

Interestingly about my journey last few days, it turned out to be not that painful to install fresh and add-on my various personal tweaks, so the possibility of perhaps of installing Ubuntu fresh and using the same tweaks that I just made to Pop is not out of the question.

BTW, I have welll supported hardware (Thinkpad T480).

Am curious as to others opinions on the support/community element. But also their experience in tweaking Ubuntu. To be honest, I haven't done a clean install of Ubuntu in at least 3 years (maybe longer).

**SeijiSensei** · January 13th, 2020

I think effective support is a crucial to running Linux. i would not choose a distro that sounds as unsupported as you describe Pop to be.

Have you tried Kubuntu with the KDE desktop? You might want to give it a whirl.

18.04 LTS: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/bi...-live/current/

20.04 LTS development version: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/daily-live/current/

I use the latter and have encountered no problems on a couple of different machines.

**CatKiller** · January 13th, 2020

I'd second the recommendation to try Kubuntu.

My laptop had Cinnamon on for a couple of years, and it was fine, but I switched it over to KDE after I'd tried that on the desktop.

People that like Pop seem to really like it.

Being able to find solutions to whatever issues you encounter is important, but the various distros are much more similar than they are different. Once you've got the hang of the fundamentals, like package management, X11/Wayland, the file system, and so on, it doesn't make that much difference which distro you use; go for whichever you feel most comfortable in.

**MoebusNet** · January 13th, 2020

I would speculate that Pop!OS is aimed at System76’s customer base who have purchased extended support. If the OS’s developers are also its support staff, that synergy could be an advantage for System76. As Pop!OS is derived from Ubuntu, which is derived from Debian, many of the solutions posted here could work for Pop!OS. Of course, YMMV.

**bunny9000** · January 15th, 2020

As for support - Meh, I fix my own problems

/ Tend not to break stuff / have backups / snapshots.

In that sense I prefer to think I know what I'm doing before breaking the system.

Now I've done it, something is going to break!