I had come to believe that Fedora 33 was my home and I dwelt in it for almost two years without even considering moving to another distro. This has to be my longest streak with any distro. F33 did represent the latest and greatest at the time it was released and though I did try Endless OS and Elementary OS 6, I never felt I would ever need to move to another distro. Then came the time to upgrade to F34 and that’s when I hit a wall. The download failed to get certain files due to version conflict and no matter how many times I tried, the upgrade kept failing. I was losing patience and decided to move on.
I took this opportunity to make some extra space for my Linux installation by playing with the partition tables. Initially when I dual booted my Windows laptop with Fedora, I dedicated half of my 250GB SSD to each operating system. I soon realized that devoting 125GB for Windows was a waste of disk space since I barely used it. I took time to back up my important files from Fedora and started with Pop!_OS installation. Using gparted, I deleted my existing ext4 and linux_swap partitions. Then logged into Windows and shrunk my C drive to afford another 30 GB to unallocated disk space. And when installing Pop!_OS, I divided the available space into a EFI Boot (1 GB), Linux Swap (8 GB) and the rest for ext4 root(~ 155 GB).
Installation went pretty smooth, I suppose this was one of the fastest installers that I have seen. And I was on their Cosmic desktop in no time. Pop!_OS seems to have done a pretty good job of building this layer on top of Gnome. Cosmic has brought together best of several desktop environments. The workspace management is spot on and makes it very easy to move apps across the work spaces and switch between them. This would be very helpful when used along with the Tile Windows. This tiling feature reminded me of i3. I have been wanting to switch to i3 on many occasions but something always troubled me and I could never make myself at home. But Pop!_OS Cosmic had me going from the moment I switched to tiling mode. I can always switch back if I want to. That’s how flexible Pop!_OS is.
The dock reminded me of Elementary OS. I like how it gets out of the way and lets you use the entire screen real estate. I have my usual apps pinned to the dock as favorites. But what is even more useful is the launcher provided by Pop!_OS. The super key is used to invoke the launcher which allows you to open new applications, switch to current open applications across work spaces etc. The launcher however does not find files from the computer. I have seen Fedora do that seamlessly. It would have been cool if Pop!_OS launcher could do it as well.
The Application menu is simple and functional, nothing to brag about and with the convenience of Dock and Launcher I doubt I would ever use the Application menu. The selection of apps is quite minimal, which is good since I would most likely opt to install my usual go to apps anyway. It comes with LibreOffice, Firefox , some other useful system tools etc. Anything else can be found on the Pop Shop which is well categorized and had several of the application that I would want to install. It does have the option to install flatpaks rather than deb installs. But when I see the amount of disk space a flatpak gobbles up as compared to a deb install, my choice is already made. If at all I want to use an application in its own sandbox, I would probably opt for some AppImages that I have been using and already familiar with.
Pop!_OS theme just gives a choice between a Light and a Dark theme. I kind of liked the dark theme, but wanted to do away with the icons. I have really come to like the Arrongin Theme along with Paper icon set. So I decided to install these over and also install the Gnome Tweaks to be able to change the themes and icons.
All in all I am happy with this distro hop. Have been following the Pop!_OS since some time and it is now that I am going all in. I definitely liked what I saw and thus the Pop!_OS journey begins….
Leisure Linux 