Behold, the gorgeous Pop!_OS

It would be remiss of us not to mention, in a spread about beautiful distros, Pop!_OS. We were thoroughly impressed by the 20.04 release back in April. Pop (we like most everything about it, bar the awkward punctuation) is made by Colorado-based Linux system manufacturer System76. Being an OEM, they wanted to be able to ship an OS guaranteed to work with their hardware. But also, just like the other distros named in these pages, an OS that makes it easy for users to do whatever they want to do. Pop’s desktop is much closer to Gnome 3 than what Mint, elementary and Solus offer, but don’t be afraid. Don’t also be afraid that the latest release gives you the option to experience (in a very gentle way) the joys of a tiling window manager.

Pop!_OS ships two editions: one featuring the Nvidia proprietary graphics driver and one featuring open source drivers (for AMD and Intel hardware). System76 have contributed an awful lot to Linux, including a Firmware Manager front-end for updating firmware via Fwupd. In Pop, this is integrated into the update tab in the Gnome Settings application. Naturally, this works with not just System76 hardware, but anything supported by Fwupd (which is a lot of hardware). Pop also has a bunch of tweaks for common gripes like multiple displays, and hybrid graphics.