My problem with Pop! OS
Hello!
For those who might not be familiar with Linux, a short background -
- Linux is an Operating system kernel, which manages your hardware such as RAM, GPU etc. and allows you to run other software.
- The kernel is too low-level to be directly used in most cases, so people/organizations/companies take that, and package other software with it to create a Distribution. Distributions are something that you can compare with Windows or MacOs. There are several popular distributions such as Ubuntu, Pop OS, Arch Linux etc.
- Desktop Environment is the look and feel of the distribution. Think about the visual differences between Windows XP, 7 and 11. One can think these three as three different DE.
I have been using Linux as my primary OS for about 5 years now. I started with Ubuntu and used it for ~2.5 years, and then switched to Pop! Os. I thought it was a solid distribution, its DE was to my liking and as a developer it stayed out of my way and let me do what I want.
However, recently I have been running into one major issue with Pop, which is making me consider switching to some other distribution. System76 - The company which builds the Pop OS distribution, also has other products such as laptops and PCs, which is originally what Pop was meant for. Currently, they are working on their own Desktop environment - Cosmic.
I have seen their update posts on it, and it looks pretty cool. However, since they started working on it, the updates to the Pop have slowed down. There are still patch and security updates which comes from Debian/Ubuntu (which is what Pop is based on), but because it is not on the latest LTS (long-term support) version, it has old versions of many packages.
Now, for most of the cases it is not a problem. I am fine with not having the latest packages, and apart from that it works well for me. However, as more and more time goes, it seems that they are spending all their resources on developing the Cosmic DE and don't have any plan for updating the distribution.
And that is not something I am blaming on them. Building a DE is a big task. Building one from scratch is an even bigger challenge. And if the team at System76 believes that Cosmic is something that will improve the experience in a meaningful way, more power to them.
But for me, it is slowly starting to get in the way. One of the projects I work on required a relatively recent version of podman and bash. However the versions available in Pop are older and not compatible with my requirements, and make the tests in the project fail.
There are ways to solve this - all packages I need are usually open source, so I can always build them from the source. If I don't want to go to that length, I can update my source lists from the latest LTS of ubuntu so that I can get newer version of packages.
However, that kind of goes against my expectations from my Linux system - I don't want to go to each software's page and download it like Windows, and I don't want to maintain the lists manually with a potential chance of adding some malicious list accidentally. I want the distribution to have decently recent versions in its lists, and to update those lists regularly.
I probably won't change my system immediately, I use it a lot and don't want to break things. However, if/when I will eventually get a new system, I will have to consider if I can continue with Pop, or change to something else. Right now, Fedora and EndeavourOS are the ones I am considering to experiment with in a VM. But if by then System76 team has not released a new version of Pop based on a newer LTS, I'll probably switch to some other distribution.
Hey, any linux users in the readers (who might use arch, btw) ? How's your experience with Pop? What other distros are you using? Let me know via email!
Wish you a great day!