Unique to Pop
Ubuntu derivatives are ten a penny, but Pop!_OS brings a shedload of innovations and a commitment to community.
For a long time, Ubuntu was the gold standard for beginner distros. It’s still a great choice, but over the years there have been decisions (some of which have been undone) that have caused consternation among the community. Pop, while still being an Ubuntu-based OS, differs from its progenitor in a few key areas.
Perhaps the most relevant today is that it doesn’t use Wayland, the new graphics protocol the Gnome desktop environment has been championing. Pop sticks with the tried and tested X.org display server for now. The people at Pop are “evaluating [Wayland’s] readiness” and will offer it when they feel it’s worthy of their users.
Another key difference is the Pop!_ Shop, which replaces Ubuntu’s Software tool. Apart from the userfacing differences, behind the scenes lies Pop’s decision to avoid the Snap packaging format (and the proprietary Snapcraft store), which is starting to proliferate the Ubuntu ecosystem. New packaging formats offer some advantages, particularly for developers who want their software to be available without the need to wait on individual distros to update their repos and package it for them. However, there are alternatives (such as Flatpak), and we also still quite like traditional packaging.
Pop also doesn’t collect information about user installations. From version 18.04 Ubuntu started collecting anonymised data about user installations by default – though the data is no doubt useful (you can see some at https://ubuntu.com/desktop/ statistics),
If you’ve ever heard anyone ever talk about Linux problems at least one of them probably mentioned Grub – the bootloader used by most Linux distributions. Heck, we mentioned it several times at the beginning of this feature. It may please you to hear, then, that Pop doesn’t use Grub, but rather uses the lighter and faster systemdboot. We could, but won’t, talk for many pages about systemd’s popularity. Instead we’ll just say (quite accurately) that you won’t ever have GRUB problems with a typical Pop!_OS install, and hope you don’t have bootloader problems generally.
Another common cause of Linux consternation (particularly when you get a taste for distro-hopping) is having to write distro ISO files to USB sticks. The most reliable way to do this has always been at the command line (with the dd tool), but this has the downside that if you get a device name wrong you can wipe out a whole disk’s worth of data. Pop comes with the cutely named Popsicle, which is a graphical tool that makes it much more difficult to write images to the wrong device.
You may, in the distant past, have had the pleasure of upgrading your BIOS, either through some overblown Windows tool or the old-school way with a bootable floppy and a DOS utility. Modern UEFI firmware can be upgraded by downloading a file onto a USB stick, and upgrading directly from that interface. But there’s an easier way, the LVFS (Linux Vendor Firmware Service) allows updates to be issued from hardware vendors directly to Linux. System76 has made this process even more streamlined through the creation of its own Firmware Manager, which integrates neatly into the Settings panel. So the once-terrifying process of updating the prima materia of your computer can be done in a couple of clicks.
LOOKING ELSEWHERE
We like Pop!_OS and we hope you like it too, but you might not, and that’s okay. There are beginner-friendly alternatives, and a lot of what we’ve talked about here can be applied to these other Linux distributions. We’re really looking forward to Mint 19.3. The beautiful elementaryOS 5.1 was released in early December 2019 and is perfect for those who prefer a macOSlike desktop. The Pop!_Shop is in fact derived from elementaryOS’s AppCenter, with the difference that the latter includes paid applications.
If you’re looking to replace travel laptops, then it’s worth considering Chromebooks. Not everyone wants to support Google, but they are cheap, and having all your data in the cloud has some advantages. ChromeOS is based on Linux, and through the magic of its Crostini VM can run ‘proper’ Linux applications, besides proprietary distractions such as Netflix.
If you’re stuck on 32-bit hardware you still have options (besides Mint). Bodhi is a great one, but it’s perhaps not
“Pop comes with the cutely named Popsicle, which is a graphical tool that makes it much more difficult to write images to the wrong device”.
as user-friendly as the OSes described above. There’s also Peppermint, MX Linux and Antix. The most recent Ubuntu LTS (Ubuntu 18.04) was the last to provide 32-bit install media, so the derivatives based on this will be the last of their lineage to do likewise. That’s okay, since these distros will be supported until 2023, which in all honesty is a few years past that hardware’s best-before date.
BEST BEFORE DATE
Microsoft was, all things considered, pretty responsible when the XP EOL date came. It continued to provide malware signatures for its Security Essentials tool for a year after the EOL date. And it’s even emitted a few patches for serious flaws (an IE bug just weeks after XP’s doomsday, Wannacry in 2017 and BlueKeep in 2019) despite being under no obligation to do so. Most data today suggests all but the most laggardy of laggards have moved on from the two-decade-old XP, its market share across all Windows versions declining from around 20% in 2014 to around 1% today.
However, data (https://gs. statcounter.com is a good place) also suggests that just under 30% of current desktop Windows users are still using Windows 7 (Microsoft’s heavy-handed forced upgrade tactics notwithstanding). And Windows 7’s EOL was 14 January 2020, just a couple of weeks before this magazine is to hit the shelves.
Managing OSes going EOL is not strictly the preserve of proprietary software – it happens in the open source world too. One aspect of Pop_OS! 19.10 we haven’t touched on is that it’s only supported for nine months (until April 2020). After that a new LTS (long-term support) release, based on Ubuntu 20.04, will be released, which will be supported for five years. Don’t worry, the upgrade process will be painless, and it’s extremely unlikely that Pop 20.04 will take much design inspiration from Windows 10. System76’s happiness champion assures us that “extensive work has gone into the pop-upgrade tool (written in Rust) to ensure that critical packages are retained on an upgrade, making it less error prone.” In the meantime, if you really want the current LTS of Pop!_OS then you can grab it from https://system76.com/ pop.
Canonical issues three intermediate versions of Ubuntu at six monthly intervals, in between its LTS releases. These are used as a staging ground for the developing features that will make it into the more thoroughly tested LTS releases. Ubuntu-based distros may follow just the LTS releases (like ElementaryOS and Mint) or follow the intermediate releases too, like Pop.
The two-yearly LTS releases of Ubuntu (and derivatives such as Pop) are supported for five years (18.04 LTS paid-for support extends this to ten year and it’s unclear if everyone will benefit from this or not), so last April saw the venerable Ubuntu 14.04 go End of Life, but not necessarily end of support. Canonical offers paid Extended Security Maintenance for organisations that are still using the old release. Recently, through its Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure
program, it’s allowed personal users to get free ESM support on up to three machines. But most home users at least seem to have happily upgraded away from Trusty Tahr. This is in stark contrast to Windows 7, which even though Microsoft offered (and in some cases tried very hard to force) free upgrades to Windows 10 in 2015, still runs on millions of machines. We think you’re one in a million, dear reader, and we hope you enjoyed this feature, and have a great new year and new decade.