Linux distro review: System76’s Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS

The subject of today's Linux distro review is perhaps one-of-a-kind—as far as we know, Pop!_OS is the first Linux distribution to be created and maintained by a hardware OEM manufacturer. At the very least, it's the first one anyone has taken seriously.

That hardware manufacturer is System76 , probably the world's best-known Linux-only laptop manufacturer. Some larger OEMs offer Linux as an alternative operating system on a few models—but System76 sells Linux systems, and  only Linux systems.

Until 2017, System76 sold its systems preinstalled with Ubuntu Linux. But Canonical left the company cold when it decided to stop development on its Unity desktop environment and move back to Gnome3—and, controversially, System76 decided that instead of merely adding its own private repository and a few packages to a stock Ubuntu install, it would create and manage its own Ubuntu-derived distribution.

Crucially, the new distribution would not just be for System76 hardware. Although the company uses the new distro to simplify and retain more control over its hardware setup, it designed Pop!_OS to be a real distro suitable for use—and encouraged for use—on any Linux PC, whether purchased from System76 or not.

Initial Installation

• I have seen a lot of Linux installers. I don't tend to find any particularly difficult or forbidding. But Pop!_OS practically slaps you in the face with messaging about how easy, open, and fun you should find it. That's not a bad thing!

  Jim Salter

• We're not sure the little robot is looking at the same screens we are. Which rocket is the "clean install" and which one is "Custom?"

  Jim Salter

• As with most distros, Custom install leads you into a disk partitioner—Gparted, in this case.

  Jim Salter

• As usual, we canceled out of the custom partitioner and selected easy mode so we could inspect Pop!_OS's choices later.

  Jim Salter

System76 has been bragging about Pop!_OS bringing ease of use and a friendly, open air to Linux ever since its first released version in 2017. This didn't strike me as much of a brag, given that the company was starting with Ubuntu, widely known as the noob-friendliest of all distros—but I was wrong. This is easily the most inviting operating system installation procedure I've ever seen in forty years of computing.

The Pop!_OS installer uses colorful, cartoonish reimaginings of Golden Age sci-fi tropes to brighten up the installer. Fewer than ten pages are necessary to get through the entire installer, and no single page devotes more than 50% of its screen real estate to technical stuff. The net effect is to reassure the user implicitly that, hey, this stuff is easy—there's no reason to be intimidated.

Despite its brevity—and devoting so much screen real estate to meaningless prettywork—the installer is friendly to technical people, too. The big graphic accents don't make it difficult to maneuver through the actual technical bits. In a particularly nice touch for technophiles and sysadmins, the installer uses an embedded, themed copy of gparted for its custom partitioner.

• Pop!_OS even managed to make LUKS encryption look open, friendly, and simple.

  Jim Salter

• Pop!_OS's LUKS setup routine includes dictionary testing during password creation and disapproves of our use of "Password1!" Nice.

  Jim Salter

• Three or more words in a passphrase, on the other hand, don't trigger Pop!_OS's key strength complaint—even nicer!

  Jim Salter

• Installation completes without having created a user profile yet—undoubtedly handy for an OEM that needs to distribute hardware.

  Jim Salter

• The odd little button next to "Restart" pops up the installer's console log.

  Jim Salter

After partitioning, the installer offers optional drive encryption and does a good job of explaining what the benefits and potential problems of that encryption might be. When selecting an encryption passphrase, the installer warns the user about passwords that are too close to dictionary words—for example, I tried Password1! and was warned against it. Better yet, when I tried a long but entirely dictionary-derived passphrase— forty eighth bobbin under the magenta —it did  not complain about the dictionary words, the lack of capitalization, or the lack of numeric or symbolic characters.

The installer finishes and asks to reboot before creating a new user profile but reassures you that it will ask you to create one after the reboot. This allows you to give someone a pre-installed, ready-to-go PC without having to resort to crude workarounds like a default profile named "Owner." Finally, although it's not obviously labeled, there's an odd little button next to "restart" which will display the installation console log.

First boot

• Veteran Ubuntu users will recognize the boot sequence text. It's been embiggened and given a funky "computer-y" looking font.

  Jim Salter

• The LUKS passphrase entry dialog is rendered graphically.

  Jim Salter

• With the disk decrypted, you're given a splash dialog that begins with "Welcome!," which scrolls through the same word in many other languages until "Next" is clicked.

  Jim Salter

• Although the keyboard was selected during the initial install, the user is given a chance to review and/or change it during the first-boot setup sequence.

  Jim Salter

• Mozilla Location Services gets its own dedicated screen and toggle switch in the first-boot wizard sequence.

  Jim Salter

• Time Zone is selected automatically using IP geodata if possible but can be manually overridden by either clicking a zone on the map or entering in a major city name.

  Jim Salter

• Gnome3 offers calendar, contact, and email integration services with many social media providers.

  Jim Salter

• When creating the user account, you are again warned if you choose an obviously stupid password. Apparently "Hunter2" is a bad choice. Who knew?

  Jim Salter

• Once the user account has been successfully created, your setup experience is officially over.

  Jim Salter

The first thing that will catch the eye of veteran Ubuntu users is the console boot sequence on Pop!_OS—it's the exact same text one might be used to from a server (not desktop!) installation of Ubuntu, but the text has been significantly enlarged and rendered in a fun/funky "computer-y" square font. We think this was a better choice than desktop Ubuntu's decision to just hide the whole thing behind a blank magenta screen—non-technical users aren't left wondering uneasily if things are actually happening in the background or not, and more technical users get valuable diagnostic information as well.

Once booted, a second setup wizard leads you through keyboard review, location services toggle, timezone setup, cloud services integration, and finally user setup. The user creation portion of the wizard warns the user about weak passwords, much as the disk encryption wizard did—and it turns out Hunter2 doesn't make it any happier than Password1! did. I really like Pop!_OS's password strength checker—no such checker is perfect, but this one gets less wrong and more right than I'm used to and will probably save quite a few users from themselves.

Exploring Pop!_OS

• Pop!_OS's version of Gnome3 is heavily modified, despite looking bone-stock at first glance. Its launcher is hidden, and the global top menu is present.

  Jim Salter

• The button that looks a bit like a Manjaro logo on the top menu shows keyboard shortcuts and toggles for tiling and active hints—more on those later.

  Jim Salter

• Clicking Activities (or pressing Super) exposes the Launcher, which has enormous stock Gnome3 sized icons. The rocket ship is Pop Shop, the distribution's software center.

  Jim Salter

Once you've completed the second wizard and dropped into the actual desktop, you're looking at what appears to be an almost bone-stock Gnome3 desktop—the launcher is hidden, the black global top menu bar is visible, and clicking Activities hides the desktop and presents you with a launcher stocked with enormous icons. Appearances can be deceiving, however—this version of the Gnome3 shell is much more heavily modified than Ubuntu's, despite looking closer to the original.

The only thing I didn't immediately recognize was an odd little button on the upper right that looks a bit like the Manjaro boot splash icon. Clicking this button drops down a menu informing you of a few useful keyboard shortcuts and offering a link to let you modify the rest of the keyboard shortcuts... and toggle tiling. Wait, tiling ? Yep. Tiling.

When you enable tiling in the little drop-down menu—which, in retrospect, shows an icon of a tiled desktop—nothing happens immediately. But when you open a second application, the first is shrunk to half the screen width, and the second is slapped next to it.

From here, everything about Pop!_OS's tiling is intuitive and self explanatory—if you resize one window, the others around it expand or shrink to match. Dragging a window from one place to another on the desktop will rearrange the tiles along with it, and there really aren't any surprises.

I will say that the tile function isn't exactly beautiful. You can in theory set the gaps between windows in the tile management drop-down, but in practice, they frequently didn't line up exactly right or in accordance to the gap. The sort of person who refuses to use anything but a Mac because nothing else is pretty enough will probably not like, or even be able to tolerate, the Pop!_OS tile management. For the rest of us, it's simple and it works.

We don't think the tile management is very useful on a full, modern desktop PC with two or more monitors—but it could easily be a godsend on a simple laptop, which, after all, is the majority of what System76 sells.