Since there is no specific forum for POP!_OS I decided to put this here. I have or had five System 76 laptops (including the HP Dev One), and have installed it on a Macbook Pro (2015), and a Lenovo T480s. I, personally do not like it for several reasons as I will detail below:

a) Look- The default Gnome/Cosmic desktop looks dated, early 2000's. GTK just looks old compared to QT derived desktops. You cannot change the look from blue on folders. Blue is nice and all, but I want to mod it without agony. I will admit I loathe Gnome and Gnome's locked down toolkits. That is purely a personal opinion, your milage may vary. But when you cannot do anything unless and until you add extensions which break as soon as Gnome updates to the latest, is ridiculous.
b) Other desktops- They also look bad, and are generally 3-5 generations behind what is out there. Their Cinnamon looks wretched, and that is my preferred desktop.
c) Minor complaints- A switch that allows the trackpad to be disabled when a mouse is attached, and right click to uninstall.

Things I really, really like:
a) Tiling. Totally the best implementation out there. Nothing else can touch it IMHO.
b) Nvidia support, way, way ahead of other distros.
c) Easy encryption of the drive at set up- Why others do not do this I cannot understand, this should be standard!
d) Ease of installation. Mint is equally easy, so both are great.
e) Fractional scaling support that does not look like garbage.

On laptops I have given to friends who needed laptops I have always installed POP!_OS with flatpaks for LibreOffice, Thunderbird, and Chrome installed, then I add HTOP. Everyone I have given a laptop to has never complained at all about POP!_OS being the distro on the laptop. The common complaint I get is "a" above.

Mods feel free to move this where ever it needs to go.

I don’t mind if you post here but I am just a regular user.

I tried Pop OS 20.10 once in a VM just to test it out. The screen resolution was maybe 800x600 so some of the dialog boxes were partially outside the framebuffer. I could not see the Next button so I had to use Tab.
Other than that, the installation was easy. It is nicely designed.

I usually run Kubuntu. I wish they would tune up the HDD partition and formatting thing.
The only options are “use recommended settings” or “use the entire HDD”.
Let’s say I want to use the entire HDD. So, now, let’s say I want to give more space to the swap partition.....I can’t or maybe I am too stupid to know what to do.
I tried OpenSUSE. They allow you to use “use the entire HDD” and click on customize and I can do exactly what I want.

GNOME:
I think it is part of the GNOME philosophy to not give too many options.
The file manager is very basic and I think you can’t even set List files or detailed view or show as large icons. I think you can’t change folder colors.
They are not going to change that philosophy.

I recommend KDE.

The file manager is Dolphin which can do all that. You can install custom themes from System Settings. There are about 50 themes now. I use Memphis98 since it looks like Win 98.
You can also change font style in the title bar, font color, caption bar active color, caption bar inactive color and a few other hundred settings.

System Monitor is quite customizable. By default, they show the RAM, CPU usage per core, network but there is no HDD activity. The Win 10 task bar is the most feature rich thing I have ever seen.
IMO, they should create the equivalent of the Win 10 task manager.

Kate is the Notepad++ equivalent.
KCalc is a feature rich calculator.

Kubuntu and Ubuntu also make it easy to install nVidia’s driver. I think Canonical was the first to push for a user friendly installation.
So, I am assuming PopOS uses a similar GUI to install the nVidia driver.
The only thing missing is installing the AMD GPU-Pro driver.


Sorry, I don’t have experience with Linux on laptops and fractional scaling.

For the most part the distros I have tried, fractional scaling is really horrid. I will freely admit that I dislike Gnome and pretty much everything about it, I love Cinnamon, and KDE. But I have to give this to POP!_OS it is pretty darn stable. I just want a color other than blue......

I just ordered a Thelio Mira and am torn between keeping POP!_OS on it, or changing it to Mint which is my preferred distro (I use Fedora Cinnamon on my Galago Pro), and am wondering if that would cause issues? I will most likely use POP initially to do firmware updates, etc, and then look at changing to Mint unless there are issues. I loathe Gnome, and the System 76 alternate DE's all look old, as in older versions.

I contacted System 76 in regards to POP!_OS and it was suggested that I do not attempt to update to the latest version of Cinnamon since it could break some things. An alternative of Fedora 38 Cinnamon was suggested.