IN-DEPTH Top of the Pop!_OS

System76 developer Michael Murphy shares his Pop!_OS insights with Linux Format’s self-proclaimed top Pop fan Jonni Bidwell.

R eaders in the US who are on the lookout for a Linux machine could do a lot worse than hit up Denver-based System76 and grab one of its fine desktops or laptops. Nope, this isn’t an advertorial, this is just fact. We’ve been impressed by System76’s efforts ever since it launched its first machines in the mid-naughties. We’d recommend them to UK readers too, but transatlantic shipping is a little pricey. Oh, and the reference to the 1776 American Revolution twinges our governmentmandated nationalistic sensitivities a tad, too.

Be that as it may, System76 has also been shipping its own Linux distribution since 2017. And it’s not just for its hardware too – it works great on other PCs. Far from being just another Ubuntu spin, Pop!_OS runs a different bootloader, uses its own shell (dubbed COSMIC, for Computer Operating System Main Interface Components), and even has its own power scheduler. Which makes it ideal for laptops.

We hit up System76 software engineer and Pop!_OS maintainer Michael Murphy to discuss the latest Pop release, a bug that hit the social media big time and the challenges faced by Gnome-based distros that don’t want to look like Gnome. And not content with all that activity, System76 is big into the Rust programming language. So much that the company is making a new Rust-powered desktop. We’re sure you want to hear about it just as much as we do. So read on...

RUST’S APPEAL IN A NUTSHELL

“After spending some time with the alpha, it was clear to me that Rust was the future of software development.”

Linux servers have been widely available for almost as long as there has been Linux. But for a long time it was remarkably difficult to buy a desktop PC with Linux pre-installed, never mind a laptop. A few smaller vendors popped up at the turn of the millennium, but most of these have since vanished. It’s a different story today, where the likes of Dell and Lenovo will happily sell you a laptop running Linux rather than Windows. We also have speciality manufacturers such as Purism and Pine, which both make Linux laptops and phones. And it would be remiss not to mention UK-based Entroware. But consider System76, which set up shop in Denver, Colorado back in 2005, and has been making finely crafted Linux machines ever since.

Hoping to cause an open source revolution (and independence from proprietary software), the first machines shipped were desktops running Ubuntu 5.10 Breezy Badger. Skip on a few years and the company now has a couple of dozen employees, does its manufacturing in-house, open sources its hardware designs, and makes its own OS as well. Pop!_OS, despite the slightly awkward punctuation, has enjoyed a huge amount of popularity thanks to being available to everyone, not just owners of System76 kit.