Ubuntu has long been the most recognizable name in the Linux space, and it's the most popular distro out there, something I've argued is actually a net negative for Linux adoption. Ubuntu is a beginner-friendly distro, but it's not the most friendly to users coming from Windows, and it makes a bad first impression.

The good news is there's no reason for Ubuntu to be your first Linux distro, and a relatively recent member of the Linux family may just be the new best option for Linux newcomers; it's called Pop! OS, and it brings some cool new ideas to the table while building on the foundation of Ubuntu. Taking the latest iteration of Pop! OS for a spin, I came away fairly impressed and happy with what's possible here.

Setup is just as easy

No problems getting started

Setting up Pop! OS, the experience is both familiar and unique. The interface is based on the COSMIC desktop environment and it features the options you would expect, such as choosing a language, time zone, and keyboard layout, as well as choosing how to partition (or not) the disk. It feels very much like the Ubuntu setup, only it doesn't have some of the visual flourishes of that installer.

Oddly, some of the information entered during the install process is asked of you again once you actually boot into the operating system for the first time, but it's not a major issue.

What's more interesting about this first-time setup, if you choose to follow it all the way, is that it actually presents you with some customization options that Ubuntu doesn't have or show you right off the bat. The COSMIC desktop environment can be themed with essentially any combination of colors of your choosing, and the setup gives you six options to choose from to get you started. Even more importantly, the setup also asks you to choose between the default look with a macOS-like dock at the bottom and a panel at the top, or a unified dock and panel that's more like the Windows taskbar. I also like that the setup informs you of features like keyboard shortcuts and workspaces, which you may not be familiar with as a newcomer.

This helps you create an experience that's both visually appealing and familiar to you right off the bat, which is a big advantage of Pop! OS over Ubuntu if you're using Linux for the first time.

What Pop! OS does right

It's better than Ubuntu

Pop! OS is based on Ubuntu and it even started by using GNOME as the desktop environment, too, so it used to have a lot of similarities to that operating system. But crucially, there are some differences between Pop! OS and Ubuntu's approach to the entire desktop workflow, and even how you get apps.

For a while now, Canonical (developers of Ubuntu) has been promoting Snap, its own packaging system for containerized apps, providing isolation form system files and wide compatibility. However, the rest of the Linux world has generally favored Flatpak, a similarly containerized packaging format for apps that's also very widely compatible and secure. Pop! OS breaks from Ubuntu here and also drops built-in Snap support in favor of Flatpak, which is an advantage across the board. Most apps are available in both formats, but many are only available as Flatpaks, and more importantly, Flatpak packages often have fewer limitations than Snap.

One anecdotal example I recall was trying to use Vivaldi on Ubuntu and noticing the Snap package didn't work with hardware acceleration, which made video playback less smooth. The Flatpak version of Vivaldi has no such issues.

COSMIC is more promising than GNOME

But aside from that major, but less apparent difference, Pop! OS also recently ditched the GNOME desktop environment over disagreements with its direction, and the team introduced COSMIC, a brand-new desktop environment that keeps some of the paradigms of GNOME, but also improves things in various ways.

I've already touched on the customization options above, but indeed, it's very rare to see a desktop environment that gives users this degree of accessible customization. Almost every surface of the operating system and the built-in apps can be customized to any RGB color value, and you can set additional colors for accents, text, and other UI elements to create the exact visual experience you want.

COSMIC also feels a little more grounded and useful with how it's designed. All the buttons built into the panel at the top of the screen have a dedicated function, instead of the combined panel Ubuntu uses, so you always know if you're going for audio settings, notifications, networking, and so on. It helps you get to those things faster, which I appreciate. And all the animations and UI elements are a little calmer and less intrusive. In GNOME, the app launcher and search bar take over the entire screen and shrink your desktop into a small thumbnail. Here, they're just floating menus, so there's less of sensory overload whenever you want to open an app.

Multitasking and window management are something this desktop also excels at, with easy options for snapping apps to either half of the screen, forcing a window to stay on top of others, taking screenshots of an individual app, and perhaps most notably, giving you the option to turn apps into tabs. Indeed, you can right-click the title bar of (almost) any app and create a "window stack", which essentially means you can drag more apps over that window to merge them all into that same window, allowing you to treat each of the apps as a browser tab. You can also change any workspace between a tiling and stacking layout at any time.

I would also say there's more of a sense of speed to almost everything in COSMIC and things generally feel very snappy. That's partly because of the lack of animations for almost everything, and that's good and bad. Having no animations makes things feel a little more sterile and antiquated, but the perceived performance is a positive. COSMIC is still very new, though, so hopefully there's some work that will be done to find a happy medium here. It's also worth noting that COSMIC is Wayland-native and it's written in Rust, which is both lightweight and secure, so this is a modern platform overall.

There's some work ahead

COSMIC still needs improvement

As great as Pop! OS is, there are some quirks to iron out, and it's largely because of the transition to this new COSMIC desktop environment. For all its problems, GNOME is a long-running, mature platform that has had a lot of time to be polished up in every way imaginable. COSMIC desktop just hit general availability a few months ago, so it's not going to be perfect.

As I mentioned above, the lack of any animations is a bit of a problem, and while it's great that you have full freedom over how to customize the look of your system, a repository of user-created themes would be a great addition to find color combinations most people may not think to try. I also said above that "most" apps can be right-clicked to show a menu with various window options, but this does require apps to support COSMIC's UI framework. Vivaldi, for example, didn't let me do this, though I can still create a window stack with a keyboard shortcut and then use the title bar for the window stack for those additional commands.

Other small issues include the fact that there are two applets for notifications out of the box, one called "Notification Tray" and the other simply "Notifications" and it's unclear why both need to exist. The COSMIC store also has an applet for a clipboard history, And some of the apps included with COSMIC are also still quite limited, most notably the COSMIC Settings app, which doesn't have a ton of advanced options. Some behaviors can't be customized yet, and it can feel a bit limiting at times. Likewise, there isn't much you can customize with the default app launcher in terms of size, and that feeling of an early product kind of permeates the whole experience. Though, I should note, there is an optional applet for a different application menu that's more similar in style to that of KDE Plasma, and I like that one. Again, though, there aren't a ton of options for configuring it.

At one point, when I looked for the Vivaldi browser in the COSMIC Store, no results were returned, despite the app being available on Flathub and me having to that repository. This was fixed after a reboot, but it was still strange.

Pop! OS is only going to get better

A long-term effort

I remember hearing about Pop! OS years ago when it was still based on GNOME, and it's reassuring to know that, after all this time, the platform is still very actively supported, and the team is confident enough to make the transition to a whole new desktop environment. The team behind Pop! OS is System76, and that's reassuring because the company is also financially invested in its success.

Systerm76 doesn't just make Pop! OS, it sells some of the few Linux-powered desktops and laptops you can get, and those devices help fund the development of the operating system, so it's likely to keep going for the long haul.

And while the transition to COSMIC may come with some hiccups, that also means the platform can only improve from this initial release. The team at System76 has already outlined plans for the next two sets of releases, including new visual effects and animations, more settings, and a wide range of other improvements that will be rolled out over the next year or so, so there are reasons to be optimistic.

But even as it stands, I already think Pop! OS is a great place to start with Linux, offering a great mix of features, simplicity, and customization. It's not an atomic or immutable distro, either, so you can freely modify aspects of it to your needs as you get more comfortable using Linux.