Hey folks.
Many moons ago when Lemmy was just getting started, I saw this community and started learning about Pop! OS. It seemed to offer a very strong set of positives:
- Major vendor support (System 76)
- Robust integration of Nvidia video drivers
- Gaming-friendly
Somewhat neutrally, it’s based on Ubuntu, which seems to be almost univerally the most popular distribution to customize. There’s a lot of software available through the Pop! OS shop, and through Ubuntu and various .deb packages, so that’s probably a net positive.
I installed on my HP Omen (10th gen i7 and Nvidia 2060), and struggled almost from moment one, and it was all about video support. Supposedly, I had the System 76-packaged Nvidia driver for Pop! OS, but the Nvidia video was often not detected, even by games/tools that claimed to support it (various Ubuntu & Debian utilities dedicated to reading video specifics kept telling me I had no Nvidia card).
I downgraded the Nvidia drivers, it seemed to fix a lot of problems, except now I was running the 400-series drivers instead of the 500-series.
With both drivers, any kind of power saving mode – video off, sleep – would COMPLETELY crash the Nvidia video card. I mean, it required a cold shut down to bring it back; it stayed dead through both logout and OS restart. I eventually turned off the power save modes.
Lots of Googling suggested that Pop and the Nvidia drivers had issues with various specific power saving modes, but I had no idea what those modes were or how to tell the OS to stop using them.
I struggled along for about a year. Games were hit or miss. Old games like Armagetron froze the system solid more often than I’d like to admit. Steam Linux games seemed to work mostly OK, when the Nvidia card was behaving.
I was making USB sticks of various Linux distributions for a friend recently (Ubuntu main, Mint, Pop! OS) and got to thinking how much I used to like Mint. So I backed up my home directory and decided to wipe my machine and start over.
And folks… that was all she wrote. Mint pops a beautiful little video menu in the task bar that lets me select Intel graphics, Nvidia graphics, or dynamic switching. The Nvidia settings app was pre-installed and it actually works, not just sometimes. And my machine can wink the screen off or go into sleep mode without completely wedging the Nvidia card, and killing the external video.
I can’t really explain why Pop! OS had so many problems for me. I’m sure System 76 regressions tests against their own hardware, and I’m sure they have it working right. But, not for my HP OMEN.
I dunno that I would characterise System76 as a major vendor, they seem like a fairly small fish.
Congrats on getting it all working though, from my own experience multi-GPU setups can be a pain on Linux.
System76 is not a huge vendor but Pop OS used to be really popular a few years ago. They’ve kind of fallen behind recently. Maybe trying to make their own DE wasn’t such a hot idea, after all.
Pop_OS has fallen behind on updates over the past couple years with their development team focused on their Cosmic DE. I’m sure it’ll catch up later, but Pop definitely isn’t in a state I could recommend to anyone right now.
Mint is a very solid choice, but just to throw another idea out there if you’re interested in out of the box Nvidia drivers, I’ve heard good things about Nobara. You can kind of think of it being to Fedora what Pop_OS was to Ubuntu. A solid base with some of the more finicky packages preinstalled.
Surprisingly Fedora worked waaaay better than Nobara for me, it failed to detect the battery percentage which was a huge deal breaker, Ultramarine GNOME works better than both though
I’m not trying to dismiss your experience because I have owned some hardware that just did not like playing nice with Linux. It was frustrating and stressful so I get it. And I have installed many Linux OS that was quirky on one machine, but not another. However, my experience with Pop!_OS is the exact opposite of yours. After hopping distros for years I was excited to find Pop!_OS. I’ve been using Pop for five or six years now and I have it on a number of machines without any major issues. I have mostly Intel for Linux compatibility, but I do have one Ryzen7 and one NVIDIA machine which happens to be a HP Pavilion laptop. The HP has performed without issue for five years. I’m genuinely pleased to hear you have found a good match for your Omen. I have some idea of why, but that’s a can of worms I don’t want to open.
Having said that I haven’t experienced major problems with Pop!_OS I will acknowledge that the LTS 22.04 is beginning to exhibit signs of non-compatibility with some programs. Notice I said “beginning to” as I don’t think there’s actually any major issues yet. Ubuntu are supporting the Jammy LTS until 2027, so there’s a long way to go with the base. No issues there. I’m afraid where things will fall apart is the GNOME version Pop is stuck on being a potential problem. If it did destabilize it would be no fault of System76 devs. They’ve kept Pop!_OS 22.04 functional and stable all these years. They’ve kept the system up to date. Pop always has the best-latest kernel for security and features. Pop’s devs have continued to improve and optimize 22.04 despite working on the COSMIC desktop environment. They still need a stable modern base OS to put the new desktop on. They still need a stable OEM for their hardware sales, which is their priority. It is impossible to make an OS that works flawlessly on every make and model of computer hardware ever released. It’s a reality. Not sure why you needed to write a break up letter though.
Even if someone were having issue with 22.04LTS they could always try the 24.04 COSMIC ISO found on the System76 Pop!_OS website. It’s only a (figurative) minute away from becoming Beta. Beta is close to finished with a few bugs to kill. I’ve been using the latest 24.04 alpha for a while now and I’m impressed. I would encourage anyone experiencing problems with 22.04 to try 24.04. Back up your data! You should do that regardless of any circumstance when doing a release upgrade or new install. From my experience with it I believe when complete Pop!_OS 24.04 with COSMIC desktop will outperform most everything else by a long shot.
A lot of controversy has transpired between Gnome and System76. Years long conflicts which saw a working relationship shift to abusive and dismissive interactions. This is the first time I’ve said publicly, and likely to regret it, but I was appalled by the unprofessional immature behavior of a few of Gnome’s developers. I won’t portray System76 as innocent, but things could have gone very differently. Maybe it was inevitable. The result being we’re now going to be blessed with a modern, super fast, memory safe, aesthetically pleasing, ultra modular, ultra theme-able desktop environment that is gaining attention from some heavy players. Anyway, the point of this paragraph is to express my disapproval in Gnome. If people that worked for me behaved like that I would have terminated their employment. I am actively trying to avoid Gnome, but having their fingers in so much of the Linux pie it will be difficult.
So, I’ve said many things to inspire trust and confidence in Pop and System76, but I realize there’s always a chance my/your specific hardware might have issue with it. And that is my experience with Mint. Maybe things are better, but I refuse to use it. I will refrain from saying derogatory things or pointing out what I consider serious security issues. I acknowledge the hard work, dedication and experience of the Mint team and appreciate their contributions to the wider open source community. If Mint works for your Omen then power to you, but for me my money is on System76’s Pop!_OS (with Fedora COSMIC a close second).
