Pop!_OS 18.10
The prospect of reviewing yet another Ubuntu-based distribution doesn’t excite Mayank Sharma. Yet there’s something different about this one…
Another Ubuntu-based distro doesn’t excite Mayank Sharma. Yet there’s something different about this one…
System76 has been working on Pop!_OS for more than a year now and the distribution now ships by default on System76 machines. However, instead of focusing its efforts on mainstream desktop users, Pop!_OS is meant for creators, developers and makers: “If you’re in software engineering, scientific computing, robotics, AI or IoT, we’re building Pop!_OS for you” wrote CEO, Carl Richell in a blog post announcing the distribution. Pop!_OS 18.10 is the project’s third major release since its inception. With the basic infrastructure in place, the distribution developers are now working on refining its user experience.
To that end, System76 developers have collaborated with the elementary OS project to develop and design Pop!_OS’s installer. The installer is easy to operate and offers full disk encryption, especially when you want Pop!_OS to take over the entire disk. If you need to modify the partitions, the distribution hands you over to Gparted to sort out your disk. Furthermore, unlike many other distribution installers, the user creation step has been moved to a modified version of Gnome’s post-install first-boot wizard.
A dash of Gnome
Like Ubuntu 18.10, Pop!_OS 18.10 uses the latest Gnome v3.30, but uses the file manager from Gnome v3.26 in its bid to display desktop icons. This behaviour will soon be rolled into a Gnome extension. Talking of extensions, the distro uses quite a few of them by default. One displays workspaces whenever you bring up the Activities Overview, and another mutes notifications in the messaging centre. There are also several Power-related extensions, like the Suspend button on the Power menu.
Using extensions isn’t unique. Yet unlike other extensions-enabled distributions, Pop!_OS doesn’t equip its Firefox browser with the Gnome Extension add-on to assist users to modify the behaviour of these extensions or install additional ones.
One of the highlights of this release are the several power-related improvements. The battery indicator has been tweaked to represent the state of the battery more accurately. It also now lists three power profiles (High Performance, Balanced and Battery Life) that you can switch between, depending on your needs.
The one Gnome tweak that will make things difficult for existing Gnome users are the remapped keyboard shortcuts. System76 reasons that the shortcuts have been worked out with input from software developers, but the tweaks necessitate a visit to the keyboard settings to reassign them to the familiar Gnome values.
On the software side, Pop!_OS is a pretty standard desktop fare with a few minor adjustments compared to Ubuntu’s defaults. Most notably it swaps the Thunderbird email client with Geary and removes some Gnome mainstays like Cheese, Transmission, Rhythmbox and Shotwell, which according to its research aren’t widely used by its customers. The mainstream open source apps are complemented by some of its own indigenous ones like the Popsicle USB flashing utility that can write several USB devices at once, and Repoman to help users manage its software repositories. Repoman replaces Ubuntu’s SoftwareandUpdates tool that’s designed to be distroagnostic and can work on any Debian-based distribution. Then there’s the DEB package installer Eddy.
The final highlight is the Pop!_Shop app store. The main screen displays some of the programs handpicked by System76 that will suit the distro’s target audience. Other programs are organised by categories. Power users can always use apt , but the removal of snapd points to the developers’ aversion to snap packages.