A Pop-ular uprising
Pop!_OS from System76 will challenge your notions of punctuation and shatter myths about Linux being exclusively for the technorati.
There was a time when just using Linux required a superhuman intellect and possibly alliances with dark wizards in order to avoid catastrophe – and installing it even more so. If you didn’t have these, it wasn’t all that much use as a desktop operating system because there wasn’t much in the way of desktop software (in the sense of fully featured apps), and it broke all the time. Windows wasn’t much better, of course, but for some reason people accepted it. Perhaps because it ran Microsoft Office.
Fast forward 20 years and things couldn’t be more different. Okay, there’s still no Microsoft Office or Adobe Photoshop (more on running Windows apps later), and you still can’t lay out a premium-quality magazine that stands the test of time with Linux (obscure burn – Ed). However, you can happily do all your day-to-day computing there. So if you’re facing the Windows 7 end of days and looking for something that isn’t Windows 10, we have that thing. It is Pop!_OS.
System76 is a US-based manufacturer of Linux desktops and laptops, which up until quite recently was not a particularly crowded area to be in. As kernel big gun Greg KroahHartman noted in an interview, Linux is serious enough that Dell will happily ship you a laptop with Ubuntu on it. That’s what System76 used to do, but being a creative bunch, they wanted to do more. So they developed their own Ubuntu-based OS, and it’s really quite fabulous.
We asked System76’s happiness manager Emma Marshall why people should consider making Pop!_OS their digital home. She replied, “Pop is great for new Linux users because it’s not overwhelming [and features a] lightweight design that stays out of the way”. Frankly, we couldn’t agree more. “If you think about what the use case is for a lot of people, it’s web browsing, word processing and creating content.
Pop has Firefox built in, which is a user-friendly web browser that some Windows users may have used before. Word processing with LibreOffice is built in as well. And it’s free!”
So that’s your bread and butter computing sorted. But what about personality? Once again Emma has the answers: “Pop feels more at home because there’s less invasive and bossy software. There aren’t 50 virus program notifications to dismiss every few hours, there aren’t activation keys and physical software packages that need to be bought in order to get things to work. Pop feels much less corporate and robotic”.