Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS has been around for a bit, having been released on 25 April, 2022, but it is still the current version and there is a story here that is worth telling.
I was recently trying out Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS, after having installed it on my System76 Galago Pro laptop. This computer had been running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Lubuntu 20.04 LTS before that, but I was looking for something a bit better, and Pop!_OS looked like it might be the answer.
While Full Circle has carried some Pop!_OS news over the years, the last release review we ran was back in October 2017, in Full Circle 126, and that was of Pop!_OS 17.10 beta, the very first release. It seemed high time for a fresh look at where this interesting Linux distribution is right now and, even more so, where it is heading, because there are exciting developments afoot.
Background
Pop!_OS is a project of System76, a US computer hardware builder that was founded in 2005 and is based in Denver, Colorado. The company sells only Linux-equipped hardware and fills a fairly brisk niche market.
From its inception, System76 has shipped computers with Ubuntu installed although they encouraged customers to install their favorite Linux distributions as well. In those days, Ubuntu used the Gnome 2 desktop, but by 2011, the Ubuntu interface had switched to Unity as Ubuntu avoided the early days of the Gnome 3 desktop and all the teething troubles that it brought. System76 was happy to ship Ubuntu with Unity until the long-promised Unity version 8 failed to materialize.
In 2017, seeking company profitability, Ubuntu’s sponsor, Canonical, announced it was ending development of Unity and switching to a modified Gnome 3 desktop that would consume a lot less internal company manpower. In a blog post, the System76 leadership said: “We were shocked. Development of the product we’ve shipped since 2011 would cease. Unity was no more … There was some relief. Most System76 employees were using different desktop environments at this point. Just keeping my team excited about Ubuntu had been hard for a while. We’re technologists, and we felt Ubuntu drift. I agreed with the Canonical strategy of maintaining Unity 7 while developing Unity 8 separately. But time dragged on and we were stuck between waiting for our new product, which sounded constantly just around the corner, and investing in Unity 7 that was on its way out. There were no good decisions. Just hold the line. That’s not comfortable for an ambitious company. Now, with Unity canceled, the world was wide open again.”
So, what to do? Canonical was successful in keeping the focus of Ubuntu in the “enterprise market”, and getting it into business and government offices along with paid support services. From customer surveys, System76 knew their customer base for Linux laptops was different – with many of their users working in science, aerospace, medicine, and robotics. There was an opportunity to create a new operating system for these customers and the company leadership decided to go their own way, start a new Linux distribution and offer it alongside Ubuntu, giving the customers a choice when ordering new hardware.
They decided to stick with the Gnome application stack, thin out the list of included default applications to cut down the “consumer” items like music players and games like solitaire, and create a modified desktop. 17.10 was the first release, out in October, 2017, and based on Ubuntu 17.10. Pop!_OS starts from a base of Ubuntu, with the same twice yearly, April and October releases and the same long term support editions every two years. From their blog posts, it seemed that enthusiasm at the company was high as the in-house development team dived into the project.
Development moved along quickly with serious changes rolled out even to existing releases, almost like a rolling release model. The seventh release, 20.10, brought a new desktop dubbed COSMIC (a backronym for Computer Operating System Main Interface Components) – with a highly configurable dock and many new keyboard shortcuts. By the time the tenth release, 22.04 LTS, was out, it had user-definable keyboard shortcuts, mouse gesture menu access, and a high degree of customization available. New items in this release included a customer support panel to connect users to System76, a choice of light and dark window themes, enhanced CPU performance with the System76 Scheduler, an improved Pop!_Shop software store, the audio controller moved to PipeWire instead of PulseAudio, and new robot-themed user icons.
Some reviewers have compared Pop!_OS to MacOS, as both are operating systems provided by hardware builders on the computers they sell. But Pop!_OS is free software and, early on, the company made the decision to make Pop!_OS freely available as a download ISO file so that anyone could install it and use it. It will run on any modern 64-bit hardware. Perhaps within the free software world that sort of “warm fuzzy” feeling of having your own free Linux distribution helps sell hardware? It can’t hurt and, in fact, it generated enough interest in the tech media that FOSSpost named it the Best Linux Distribution of 2022. That put it in pretty good company, as their previous two winners were MX Linux and Linux Mint.
Once Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS was released on 25 April, 2022, a decision was made to skip the fall “interim” release which would have been 22.10, concentrating on a quantum leap instead of a steady stream of incremental changes. The original COSMIC desktop was working well but a calculation was made that writing a whole new desktop in the Rust programming language would result in something lighter, faster, more responsive, and better overall. There was no deadline to finish it but all new Pop!_OS releases ceased, so that the team could build the new COSMIC DE (desktop environment) as it came to be known. When out, it will include a new text editor, and a lot more. When is it coming? Hard to say, as no date has been announced, but perhaps it will arrive in time to become Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS, due out in April 2024. Meanwhile, hardware is being shipped with a user choice of Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS or Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
Getting Pop!_OS
Pop!_OS is easy to download from the official website. Downloads are http only, as there are no BitTorrents available. There is a choice of three downloads: the “vanilla” version at 2.48 GB, one that includes built-in Nvidia graphics card support at 2.97 GB, and a Raspberry Pi 4 version at 2.41 GB.
By today’s standards, these file sizes are fairly small. For example, the “vanilla” version is half the size of Ubuntu 23.04 which is 4.9 GB.
SHA256 sums are provided for each version, making it easy to run a quick check and make sure the download is good.
Installing
I tested Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS by dropping it onto a USB stick equipped with Ventoy 1.0.91. Pop!_OS is officially listed as “supported” on Ventoy, and it booted up just fine from there. After testing it out, I went ahead and installed it on my laptop from Ventoy, and that ran smoothly too.
One oddity: when you boot up Pop!_OS from a stick for testing, the installer interface opens and cannot be closed or minimized. If you want to just test out the desktop, the best way is to move to a new workspace and do the testing there, without the clutter of the installer sitting open.
System requirements
The recommended system requirements for Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS are: 64-bit processor 4 GB RAM 16 GB of hard-drive space
In my testing, I found after a fresh reboot with nothing open, that Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS idled at 4.2 GB, and with Firefox, gedit, LibreOffice Writer and Nautilus open, it was using 9.5 GB of RAM – so 4 GB is unrealistically low. This compares to an idle RAM of 1.3 GB for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
Hopefully, the idle RAM required will be decreased when the next Pop!_OS version with COSMIC DE is introduced.
Trying out Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS
The COSMIC desktop is very flexible and configurable. You can see a lot of work and testing has gone into it, even though this is only its third release with COSMIC.
Pop!_OS is basically a modified Gnome desktop with Gnome applications. The menu system is different from what you find in plain Gnome or even in Ubuntu, though. Ubuntu has two menus, while Pop!_OS has three: the launcher, applications, and workspaces. Each can be accessed several ways: via keyboard shortcuts, mouse gestures, or point and click.
The launcher is just a simple interface where you can search for applications which are currently open or closed. They can then be selected by mouse or keyboard. Using it is fast and easy. It is opened by default by a tap on the super (Windows) key, although , if you want something else, all the key bindings can be changed.
The applications menu can be opened by super+a from the panel button, or a four-fingered swipe right. The workspaces menu can be opened by super+d from the panel button, or a four-fingered swipe left. A four-finger swipe up or down changes workspaces. Workspaces can be set as fixed in number or dynamic, which means one more is available than you are currently using. There are also default keyboard shortcuts for many common actions. For instance, super+t opens Gnome Terminal, while super+f opens Gnome Files (Nautilus).
Whether you prefer to point-and-click, stay on the keyboard, or use your mouse or touchpad, Pop!_OS has you covered.
Pop!_OS also has sophisticated tiling capabilities which arrange open application windows in a non-overlapping manner, plus allow grouping and stacking them. This probably works better on a bigger screen than a laptop.
There is a definite learning curve, but once you master a few items, work becomes very quick. Overall the COSMIC desktop works very well in this release. It really does feel much more geeky than enterprise oriented.
Settings
Unlike Ubuntu, which offers minimal user settings, Pop!_OS gives users lots of choices. Some distributions, like Lubuntu and Ubuntu Budgie, also have lots of choices, but the settings are all spread out and can be hard to find. This is one area where Pop!_OS shines, as the settings are all in one place, in a modified Gnome settings GUI. It is quite outstanding how organized it is. Not only can users configure the desktop from settings, but also set updates and even connect to help pages and open support tickets, if on System76 hardware.
At present, the settings are a bit uneven, though. Pop!_OS has its own custom dock, and the setting menus allow dozens of customizations. You can make it look and work almost anyway you want. My personal favorite dock setting is that I can turn it off as I prefer to save the screen real estate and use the launcher instead.
In contrast to the myriad of dock settings, there are only two window themes: dark and light. The dark theme is basically black, and the light is light colored windows with brown tops.
Pop!_OS provides 53 wallpapers that run from whimsical, to bright, to toned down, to abstract, all from the pens of the company artists. Quite a number are robot-themed, which seems to be a System76 specialty. There is probably a wallpaper here for everyone, but you can also use your own, if desired.
The default system font is Fira Sans in either a 10 or 11 pt, which I found a bit small so, as suggested in the excellent on-line documentation, I installed Gnome Tweaks and bumped the fonts up to 12 pt, which looks much better. Gnome Tweaks opens up many additional setting possibilities.
Overall, the main settings GUI has too many choices to describe in detail, but I will mention two that I found useful – the window buttons and the top panel buttons. By default, Pop!_OS windows show only “minimize” and “close” buttons, but the settings offer adding a maximize button or removing the minimize one. I prefer all three on my windows. There is also a setting to remove the “applications” and “workspaces” buttons from the top panel which I did to reduce clutter, since I prefer using the keyboard shortcuts anyway.
Applications
Some of the applications included with Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS, including updates, are: Archive Manager (File Roller) 3.42.0 archiver CUPS 2.4.1 printing system Document Viewer (Evince) 42.3 PDF viewer Document Scanner (Simple Scan) 42.0 optical scanner Files (Nautilus) 42.6 file manager Firefox 114.0.2 web browser Gnome Calendar 41.2 desktop calendar Gnome Disks 42.0 disk manager Gnome Terminal 3.44.0 terminal emulator Image Viewer (Eye of Gnome) 42.0 image viewer LibreOffice 7.3.7 office suite MPV 0.34.1 video player PulseAudio 15.99.1 audio controller Popsicle 1.3.0 USB ISO writer Text Editor (gedit) 41.0 text editor Geary 40.0 email client Pop!_Shop 3.4.2 package management system Videos (Totem) 42.0 movie player Wget 1.21.2 command line webpage downloader
As can be seen, these are a mix, mostly from Gnome 40-42. What is more notable than what is here, is what isn’t. Not included are a webcam application, music player, photo manager, bittorrent client, file back-ups, image editor, video editor, remote desktop client, and games, although all are available in the repositories, if you want them.
LibreOffice is provided complete, lacking only LibreOffice Base, the database application that is rarely used.
The default suite of applications is enough to get most people started, but is fairly minimal compared to many distributions. Personally, I prefer this approach, as I would rather add the applications I need, than have to identify and remove ones I don’t want, in an effort to reduce clutter.
Pop!_OS has its own repositories, which are a mirror of the Ubuntu ones. It uses .deb files by default, but FlatPak is enabled, using flathub.org. There are no Snap applications and snapd is not installed by default, although it is in the repositories, if you want it.
With no Snaps, Firefox is from the Mozilla-provided tarball instead. This does give slower updates to new versions but also avoids all the current list of complaints about the Snap version of Firefox.
Package management is via the Pop!_Shop, a fork of the elementaryOS software center. Pop!_Shop not only provides graphical installation and removal of packages, but also system updates. Pop!_Shop does offer up proprietary software applications from FlatHub, including the Google Chrome and Opera browsers. Because it is based on Ubuntu, Pop!_OS uses APT, so you can easily do your package management from the command-line or install other package managers like Synaptic.
Conclusions
Overall Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS is quite impressive in daily use. Once you learn some of the keyboard shortcuts, it becomes fast and smooth. The level of customization available makes it easy to adapt it to your own way of doing things, rather than the other way around. That quickly makes it feel friendly and familiar.
It will be very interesting to have a look at the next release of Pop!_OS with the new Rust-based COSMIC DE and see what it brings.
External links
Official website: https://pop.system76.com/