retrogirl

That's a lot of improvements and bug fixes. Some great features too. However, I strongly dislike bland Open Sans. Yuck! What the fuck are they thinking making their unique OEM desktop font look like everything everywhere and blending into the Gooble-verse. OPens Sans is used on something like 20 million web sites, numerous apps and Android phones. Google owns it. I understand the technical reasons why they might try to use it, but it's not a good fit for System76. FiraGO or DejaVu Sans would be a better company fit. I imagine there's a good portion of their target market who don't appreciate Google's abusive and intrusive behavior and attempt to de-Google. Their company aesthetic, adherence to open source philosophy and attempt to buck the abusive corporate tech surveillance right down to the firmware is at odds with using this bland overused corporate owned font. System76 strip out all of the telemetry, closed source additions and account options Canonical add to Ubuntu. They have a reputation for respecting their customer's privacy and Google is the polar opposite. I hope that decision doesn't bite them in the ass.

I'm saying what the fuck, but in the end it's just a font and can be changed, and I will be changing it. COSMIC is absolutely awesome otherwise. I know there's a lot of unavoidable corporate contributions to Linux, but this one is totally avoidable. It's a choice and decision that has me perplexed. And, I know Open Sans is open source, but I don't get this at all. FiraGO would make more sense. It's an improved Fira Sans with international glyphs.

Different question for you - What is the hardware? Some machines like my Lenovo Thinkpad can swap function and media priority by pressing FN+ ESC. Maybe there's something to be found for your make/model.

Let me try something later. Get back to you.

I am used to and love a keyboard driven set up, so Pop's native auto tiling is a comfortable fit. Originally based on i3WM it was a perfect swap and I've not looked back all these years.

Many things people will say about Pop are related to aesthetics, but Pop's real power and reason to use lay deep in the system. Pop has the reliability of Debian and the utilities of Ubuntu, but Pop's devs strip out anything from upstream that is not in the average user interests, or not in alignment with open source principles. They often rewrite entire system components in a memory safe code language called Rust. So the things they remove make it more user friendly and less creepy corporate crap. Telemetry, Snaps backend and Ubuntu Pro are three examples that come to mind.

Pop's devs are constantly investigating ways to optimize and tweak the system for better performance. Many of these tweaks and System76 software have been accepted upstream being high quality code and improving things significantly.

Pop is NOT Ubuntu or some reskin or basic fork of it. Ubuntu ISO is now a whopping 6GB+ where Pop is under 3GB. So much bloat is removed. And one of Pop's most important features is the fact it is created as an OEM operating system for hardware sales. System76 NEED a stable working OS at all times and Pop's devs are on the ball. They have consistently demonstrated that they are able to keep security at a maximum while maintaining usability.

OK, maybe not totally intuitive yet, but you actually need to type the keys in, and then press enter. For example, if you want Raise volume with Alt Shift and Up arrow you need to type Alt+Shift+Up, then press enter for it to "take".

Go to Settings> Input Devices> Keyboard> View and customize shortcuts. This is where you can modify existing shortcuts or add custom ones. There's Volume keys and Play/Pause etc in >Keyboard shortcuts >System which you can remap. Having said, I do remember changing the need to use the function key first for media/F1-12 keys in BIOS. That reverses whatever they currently do. If you reverse it you'll need to press function for the F keys then. So depends on what you're looking to.

Giving this a try. Seems like a consistent method across machines and browsers if it works. Changing servers is a hassle and redirecting traffic to a frontend is not the best solution for privacy.

Simple - Leverage and manipulation to comply.

I'm not trying to dismiss your experience because I have owned some hardware that just did not like playing nice with Linux. It was frustrating and stressful so I get it. And I have installed many Linux OS that was quirky on one machine, but not another. However, my experience with Pop!_OS is the exact opposite of yours. After hopping distros for years I was excited to find Pop!_OS. I've been using Pop for five or six years now and I have it on a number of machines without any major issues. I have mostly Intel for Linux compatibility, but I do have one Ryzen7 and one NVIDIA machine which happens to be a HP Pavilion laptop. The HP has performed without issue for five years. I'm genuinely pleased to hear you have found a good match for your Omen. I have some idea of why, but that's a can of worms I don't want to open.

Having said that I haven't experienced major problems with Pop!_OS I will acknowledge that the LTS 22.04 is beginning to exhibit signs of non-compatibility with some programs. Notice I said "beginning to" as I don't think there's actually any major issues yet. Ubuntu are supporting the Jammy LTS until 2027, so there's a long way to go with the base. No issues there. I'm afraid where things will fall apart is the GNOME version Pop is stuck on being a potential problem. If it did destabilize it would be no fault of System76 devs. They've kept Pop!_OS 22.04 functional and stable all these years. They've kept the system up to date. Pop always has the best-latest kernel for security and features. Pop's devs have continued to improve and optimize 22.04 despite working on the COSMIC desktop environment. They still need a stable modern base OS to put the new desktop on. They still need a stable OEM for their hardware sales, which is their priority. It is impossible to make an OS that works flawlessly on every make and model of computer hardware ever released. It's a reality. Not sure why you needed to write a break up letter though.

Even if someone were having issue with 22.04LTS they could always try the 24.04 COSMIC ISO found on the System76 Pop!_OS website. It's only a (figurative) minute away from becoming Beta. Beta is close to finished with a few bugs to kill. I've been using the latest 24.04 alpha for a while now and I'm impressed. I would encourage anyone experiencing problems with 22.04 to try 24.04. Back up your data! You should do that regardless of any circumstance when doing a release upgrade or new install. From my experience with it I believe when complete Pop!_OS 24.04 with COSMIC desktop will outperform most everything else by a long shot.

A lot of controversy has transpired between Gnome and System76. Years long conflicts which saw a working relationship shift to abusive and dismissive interactions. This is the first time I've said publicly, and likely to regret it, but I was appalled by the unprofessional immature behavior of a few of Gnome's developers. I won't portray System76 as innocent, but things could have gone very differently. Maybe it was inevitable. The result being we're now going to be blessed with a modern, super fast, memory safe, aesthetically pleasing, ultra modular, ultra theme-able desktop environment that is gaining attention from some heavy players. Anyway, the point of this paragraph is to express my disapproval in Gnome. If people that worked for me behaved like that I would have terminated their employment. I am actively trying to avoid Gnome, but having their fingers in so much of the Linux pie it will be difficult.

So, I've said many things to inspire trust and confidence in Pop and System76, but I realize there's always a chance my/your specific hardware might have issue with it. And that is my experience with Mint. Maybe things are better, but I refuse to use it. I will refrain from saying derogatory things or pointing out what I consider serious security issues. I acknowledge the hard work, dedication and experience of the Mint team and appreciate their contributions to the wider open source community. If Mint works for your Omen then power to you, but for me my money is on System76's Pop!_OS (with Fedora COSMIC a close second).

COSMIC is already available outside of Pop!_OS. There's already a good number of distributions (members of distributions) working on integrating COSMIC. There's Fedora and NixOS and I hear SerpentOS is interested too. Maybe Bazzite will do the work to integrate COSMIC.

I don't mind The Register, and overall I think the article was objective and informative. There's a couple things I think should be noted. Firstly, it mentioned Pop uses systemd-boot instead of GRUB and kind of inferred that was unusual. It might seem unusual when comparing it to the number of distributions still using GRUB, but if you consider things logically, using systemd-boot on a system that uses systemd it makes a lot more sense than using an old, bloated, unsecure chain-loader. Systemd-boot meets Freedesktop bootloader specifications for a bootloader with systemd. It's simple, fast and secure. You can use GRUB if you like, but it's probably only familiarity that keeps it around.

I don't think Pop's partition layout, use of encryption is "overly paranoid". It's timely and necessary!

And finally, I don't think the author completely comprehends what is possible with COSMIC desktop. I could understand their POV if COSMIC was actually like GNOME in that it is difficult to modify heavily without causing instability. Gnome modification also relies on third party software which GNOME often don't support. So saying "If you don't like GNOME, you won't like this" could be true if stock COSMIC wasn't able to be modified easily. However, COSMIC is supremely easy to modify and people who like KDE, Cinnamon or any other desktop will be surprised to learn that they will likely be able to use Pop!_OS with COSMIC and make it look like KDE, Cinnamon, Gnome or even Windows. It's only a matter of desktop configurations, most of which will be native in Settings, and with the difference being COSMIC will remain stable. I will also mention that Gnome have never had a native tiling solution.

COSMIC is not Gnome. It's not even a fork of Gnome. It doesn't even use GTK3. It's completely new, and when alpha2 is complete I'm sure many people will suddenly "get it". COSMIC is integrating many features that Gnome have been removing for years.

Register, I like you, but I think you missed some important considerations.

You CAN opt out of using anything Meta offers. Just don't use that abusive corporate crap!

The fact that they really want to disrespect your privacy, scrape every last morsel of anything they can get there grubby mits on for serving you ads, and feed you altered propaganda and shit that they think you should see says volumes about you if you allow them to do that to you. It says a lot about the Australian government too then. Here's EU taking these greedy corporate monsters to task while Australia is talking about giving them EVEN MORE personal information by trying to enforce ineffective faulty age verification with biometric government issued ID on social media. Just walk away.