Comment by thesurlydev
2 years ago
I'm not associated with System76 but if you currently use Ubuntu as your desktop check out Pop OS. It does a great job of smoothing some of the rough edges and has great support for Nvidia cards. After years of using Ubuntu exclusively, I switched to Pop OS about 4 years ago and never looked back. Note that my comment comes from using it as a desktop on my custom-built PC, not a laptop.
My main gripe with pop_os is how bloated it seems and how slow and sluggish it feels at times compared to KDE while its DE feels being more janky and less stable than vanilla Gnome Ubuntu which I also dislike but that's another story.
1.2GB or more of memory usage at idle when most of the KDE distros I tried, even the Ubuntu based ones like Kubuntu, go around 700MB. Plus it just feels sluggish and slow on not so modern machines.
What exactly is Popos delivering more than the likes of Kubuntu or Nobara for the near double extra resources used?
>1.2GB or more of memory usage at idle when most of the KDE distros I tried, even the Ubuntu based ones like Kubuntu, go around 700MB. Plus it just feels sluggish and slow on not so modern machines.
Isn't this irrelevant nowadays? Don't the OS's consume/free memory dynamically, and idle usage is meaningless?
Sure, PopOS isn't the best choice for your Raspberry Pi, but we are talking about desktop computing, where 1.2GB of RAM is nothing.
Being a hog with resources always bites you in the ass sooner or later.
Firstly, 1.2 GB RAM or more is not 'nothing' if you have 8GB of RAM or less, which is still a lot of people these days.
At that scale the difference 500MB to 1GB RAM wasted by your DE could mean a few extra apps or browser tabs you can run before you hit the swap meaning a great usability boost.
Secondly, you haven't answered my question on what Popos does extra to justify the extra resource usage, you only justified the resources waste with the argument that 'RAM is cheap'.
I for one absolutely love their hybrid window tiling shell and architecture as Gnome plugins. I don't think KDE has something quite on the same level although there is movement in that space.
I think I have 200MB idle memory usage with Bodhi.
they are a good company, the only tip I would recommend, if you don't have a beefy system. Is install Pop_OS so it has all the GPU support etc, and then just run some lightweight WM. That switch got me a boast on the speed of an old laptop.
As far as Nvidia goes, I was impressed with the ubuntu-drivers autoinstall command which just works for me. Not sure how long that has been around but it was a pleasant surprise.
Does Pop OS allow you to install software that Canonical forces through snap, like Firefox or Chromium, using the distribution's package manager (apt or whatever)?
Yes, you can install things manually, though popOS has its own own flatpak based "store" if you prefer that model. There are a few things that are missing from both though because the vendor only releases software in snap form and no one's bundled it otherwise (e.g. lxd). For those, you can either build from source or install snap yourself.
Yes, installing things manually is always an option (even in Ubuntu!), but I wondered if in Pop it was an option to "apt install firefox" and get your package installed the "old way", with no sandboxing, using shared libraries from the system, allowing for upgrading with "apt upgrade" the moment you decide, etc. But if PopOs repo is flatpak based as you say, I guess the answer would be no.
1 reply →
Yes. I'm using Pop and my Firefox is installed through apt.
You can use Snaps and Flatpak if you want.
Pop OS is very bloated. If you're looking for something on the lean side, check out Manjaro.
Maybe keep the distro wars out of a thread where people are barely able to accept that daily driving Linux is an option.
Anecdotally, recently I tried to upgrade/update a PC (at my parent's house) running a 5 YO Manjaro build and was not possible. All mirrors dead, GPG keys server dead, broken dependencies, etc... I am far from a Linux expert but tried everything I could, sometimes checking 10 YO threads and ChatGPT. In the end I just installed Windows O o.
if you actually care about bloat, by far the best* thing to do is set up arch linux manually (no archinstall script) and just install the packages you actually need. it's insane how little it actually takes to get a working system.
it's a bunch of effort though, both to learn how everything works and to set up all the things you're usually just used to being there by default. but once it's done you'll be able to fix any issue that pops up, because you actually KNOW what's on your system, as opposed to it being a massive collection of things you have no idea about.
*something like gentoo might be better but... compiling a browser takes ages and i recommend having an up to date browser, so you'll spend tons of time on that.
>Pop OS is very bloated. If you're looking for something on the lean side, check out Manjaro.
There are 100 distros, each with pros and cons, many far lighter than Manjaro.