Linux distribution
Pop!_OS 21.04
A desktop distro that offers a different way of working… Neil Bothwick spends a night on the tiles with Pop!_OS.
IN BRIEF
An Ubuntu-derived distribution aimed at those that use their computers professionally, or at least seriously, but still useful for general purpose computing. The options of a tiling window manager and full filesystem encryption show its intended use, but these can be turned off or not used and Pop!_ OS becomes another general purpose desktop distro. Pop!_OS is created by a hardware supplier, System76, but works with commodity hardware too.
Distros based on Ubuntu are ten a penny – well, cheaper than that because they are free, but you know what we mean. Ubuntu itself is pretty good, not to mention rather popular, so any remake of it needs to offer something special. Pop!_OS is slightly unusual in that it is developed by a hardware vendor, System76. While it is the default OS on their hardware, thanks to the joys of the GPL any of us can download and use it. Pop!_OS is based on Ubuntu, but is it sufficiently different to stand out from the multitude of Ubuntu respins?