Pop!_OS 21.04 Full Review - Cosmic is Awesome!

[Music] this review of popos 2104 is brought to you by shells.com shells is a virtual desktop solution that allows you to have your very own desktop computer in the cloud once you set up your account you'll be able to access your virtual desktop through your web browser or via their mobile and desktop apps shells offer some great distributions too such as ubuntu mangero mint opensusa mx and others and they work directly with the community and distro developers to make their service seamless in fact they also offer windows and android desktops as well so you could test out apps for other platforms without wasting valuable ram by running a virtual machine they have 20 operating system options available and counting and pricing is simple shells offers transparent cost effective pricing and key features such as automatic backups are included once you set up your account you can get your very own cloud desktop running in less than 5 minutes no one does it faster and you can upgrade at any time to get more power in seconds definitely check out shells.com via the url on the screen which is also linked in the description below shells is awesome [Music] hello again everyone and welcome back to learn linux tv in today's video i'm going to be reviewing papa west 2104 which was just released and i'm really excited to get into this because this is actually my distribution of choice so anytime there's a new version of popos i get very excited to review it and this particular version of popos is going to be especially exciting to review because this is the first version of the distro to feature the new cosmic desktop which is going to be one of the main focuses of this video and i can't wait to dive in so without any further hesitation let's go ahead and dive into the review of papa west 2104 first of all let's go ahead and talk about the installation process for the most part the installer is fairly straightforward just like before you download popos via an iso image and then you write that image to a flash drive and then you use the flash drive to install it what's especially important is that you can use live mode to test out hardware compatibility before you install the distribution so for example you could test out your wi-fi card your audio card or any other hardware that you might have and make sure that everything is compatible before you actually commit to install it over your current operating system now it might seem like a no-brainer that popos features a live installer i mean after all pretty much every distro features a live installer nowadays but i think it's one of those things that some people well ignore for some reason in a lot of forums that i've seen there's quite a few messages from people that have installed a linux distribution and they're complaining that wi-fi doesn't work audio doesn't work and things like that and considering that you can test those things in live mode i'll never understand why so many people replace their current operating system without actually making sure that their replacement operating system is going to be compatible before they install it but i digress the installer is solid and it gets the job done and who can ask for more than that i would have preferred that it gives you the option to set the hostname during installation though it's a bit annoying that you have to set that after the fact but that's my only gripe it's not really that big of a deal for me to set the hostname after installation but it is one of those things that i really wish they'd implement in addition when you install popos it actually copies the live version of the installer to your disk as a recovery partition so that way you can actually access the installer again without needing to reach for a flash drive that's one of the many things that i think sets popos apart from other distributions they offer a very solid and professional desktop experience the biggest change when it comes to the installer is that it features an updated initial setup screen after the installation process is complete you can actually customize your desktop experience before you start using it for the first time and that includes being able to configure the panel one of the new features of 2104 which even allows you to go as far as turning it off altogether in addition other new features include things like active directory support being integrated so that might mean that popos could gain more traction on enterprise workstations in the future that would be awesome now let's go ahead and talk about the cosmic desktop having a panel is just one of the many new features of cosmic but before we get into that we need to talk about what cosmic actually means similar to other distributions such as ubuntu and fedora popos ships the gnome desktop environment by default they've always included their own tweaks when it comes to their implementation of gnome but they've never gone as far as to hide the fact that it's known under the hood so when system 76 announced their cosmic desktop many people thought that what they were going to do was fork gnome and create their own desktop environment but actually that's not what cosmic is at all in fact even in this new release you can go to the about section of system settings and see very clearly that the desktop is still labeled as gnome so if cosmic desktop isn't a fork of gnome then what the heck is it it's best to think of cosmic as a different desktop experience on top of gnome essentially it's the same idea as touchwiz on samsung phones on those phones they still use android underneath but they alter the user experience from stock android and they call that alteration touchwiz so cosmic is kind of like that but unlike touchwiz it doesn't suck and also unlike touchwiz you can disable it if you don't like it but you probably won't want to disable it because cosmic gives us additional features and customizations that gnome itself doesn't provide and it gives you those features without hiding the fact that it's known so you might be wondering then if the developers of pop os are going to be giving you a brand new experience on top of gnome then why not fork it well actually in my opinion it doesn't really make sense to fork an entire desktop environment at least from a development standpoint i mean developers can only be stretched so far and with cosmic you get all the same gnome applications that you're accustomed to but with a new custom user experience on top of it that'll add value but the new features are completely customizable so they're not going to force any of the new settings on you you can actually revert many if not all of the changes now let's talk about some specific features of the cosmic desktop first the panel that's going to be the thing that you'll notice most likely as soon as you install it especially if you've used previous versions of pop os because this is the first version of the distribution to include a panel at all and you can see it right here its default position is to be on the bottom edge of the screen horizontally the panel includes a mix of apps marked as favorites and also apps that are currently running apps that are running will have a dot underneath the icon while apps that aren't running will not so it works essentially the same way as a panel does in most distributions nowadays and i think the fact that it's even present at all will make some people very happy and for people like me that don't really like panels we can just simply turn it off however i don't really like the fact that the panel is along the bottom edge of the screen nowadays the majority of all displays are widescreen this means that you have less screen real estate vertically than you do horizontally if the panel were to be set up vertically instead of horizontally that would leave more room for your applications but thankfully you can change it and i will show you the settings screen a bit later now another big change to talk about when it comes to the cosmic desktop is the fact that applications and workspaces have separate sections instead of sharing the same screen and you'll notice that right away at the top left corner of the screen you'll see that we have workspaces and applications here separately if you click on workspaces it shows you a list of your current workspaces aka virtual desktops but what's different now when it comes to workspaces is that they're shown on the left side of the screen instead of on the right side of the screen in addition in vanilla gnome when you view the workspaces overview you'll see an application icon on the same screen but here is completely absent and that makes sense because applications again have their own section by default we have dynamic workspaces just like before and that means we have exactly as many workspaces as we need at any given time when you open an app on an empty workspace a new empty workspace is created so you always have at least one empty workspace to choose all the usual keyboard shortcuts that are related to workspaces are still present as well one difference when it comes to keyboard shortcuts though is that instead of simply pressing super aka the windows logo key to view the workspace overview like you were able to do in previous releases you can now do the same thing by holding super and pressing letter d and what that will do is get you to the workspace overview without you actually having to click on workspaces at the top of the screen just like with the previous version of popos you can switch workspaces without even having to view the workspace overview at all and you could do that by holding down control and super at the same time and while you hold those buttons down you can press up or down to switch between workspaces you can also move a window from the current workspace to another one by clicking on it then holding shift and super at the same time while pressing up and down as you can see here i'm able to move a particular application window from one workspace to another and basically that means you get all the same functionality as previous versions of popos when it comes to workspaces with some slight adjustments and also with workspaces being on their own screen now let's take a look at the applications menu next to the workspaces button like i mentioned before the applications menu has its own dedicated button as you see here the app menu has several pages each containing applications that we have installed on our system and your normal known features are exposed here as well such as being able to drag an application icon on top of another one and that allows you to create groups of applications that way you can organize your applications menu any way you'd like now that's not a popos specific feature you can do that in any version of gnome nowadays but it is something that i thought would be worth pointing out for the most part the applications menu is almost exactly the same as before but again workspaces and applications no longer share the same screen to be honest i'm not really a fan of the application menu in gnome and this isn't a knock against popos this is a side effect of gnome itself i'll never understand why an application menu needs to take up the entire screen when i click on applications i can no longer see what i'm working on and that means i'm basically taken out of my workflow each time i go to launch a new application but thankfully that's not really so much of a problem in papa west considering that they have a dedicated app launcher when you press the super key the launcher immediately appears and that makes it super easy and fast to launch a new application and it also gives you the ability to avoid the applications menu altogether you simply press super and start typing the name of an application that you want to launch and you don't even have to type the full name of the app just enough characters to narrow down the list i absolutely adore the launcher in popos in the past i used to install a dedicated app launcher on all of my linux installations namely ulauncher which has been my favorite up until now and that's a great one to use if you're looking for essentially the same thing on a different distribution if you've used previous versions of pop os then it might take you a little while to get used to the fact that the super key is mapped to the launcher when in previous versions it brought up the workspaces overview as i mentioned earlier that's been moved to super plus d so you can still do that it's just that the default keyboard shortcuts have been rearranged a little bit so again if the old way is mapped to your muscle memory they'll just take a little bit of time before you get accustomed to the new settings but if you really don't like the new keyboard shortcuts you can actually change them back another new feature that i like is that there's a desktop menu in system settings and this puts all the desktop related settings in one menu including the settings for the dock you can also use this section to change what the super key does so if you prefer the older way you can go ahead and change it back in addition it also allows you to enable or disable the individual buttons for workspaces and applications and there's also other settings here that you might want to take a look at such as the ability to enable or disable the minimize button in application windows but perhaps even more exciting is the section that's dedicated to setting up the dock and these settings will be very familiar to you if you're accustomed to setting up the dock in ubuntu you have all the essential tweaks here for customizing the dock such as setting the size where it's located and you can also make it auto hide which is my favorite setting if i was going to have a dock in my installation then i would definitely want it to auto hide because that gets it out of the way of any applications that i might have on the screen just like with previous versions of pop os we have tiling mode again in 2104 i really like this feature a lot and i've gotten to the point where i use this on all of my computers when it comes to an ultra wide display such as the one that i have here in the studio the tiling feature is especially awesome if you also have an ultrawide display then you'll definitely need to turn on tiling it's really great at first i didn't really care for tiling when it comes to wide displays though but the tap stacks feature makes it work on smaller displays as well you can create a tab stack from your current window by holding super and pressing s and then you can move another application window into the stack by pressing super and enter at the same time that allows you to move the application into the tab stack this allows you to make better use of each quadrant and tiling mode and it also allows you to use tiling mode on displays that are smaller and not normally a good fit for this kind of thing this isn't a new feature but definitely something i wanted to point out because i highly recommend that you give it a try i really love papa west 2104 i can tell you right now it's my favorite distribution but to balance out this review we need to talk about the downsides as well there's a few quirks and oddities that i want to make sure you guys are aware of and the elephant in the room is that papa west 2104 ships gnome 3.38 again and that's not really the fault of the papa west developers because they based their distribution on ubuntu and ubutu 2104 which this distro is based on actually ships the older version of gnome so they're essentially just inheriting whatever version of gnome ubuntu themselves ship in their distribution and that's still a bit sad for me because i always look forward to having the latest gnome release in every version of papa west just like i look forward to that same thing in ubuntu so not having gnome 40 the latest release as of the time i'm recording this video and popos 2104 is definitely a downside but again i don't really blame the popos developers for this because they inherit whatever ubuntu gives them so i get it in addition when it comes to pop os 2104 it's taking on its own identity basically and going in its own direction so it's not really a gnome distribution at this point well it is at its core it gives you gnome but they give you a new experience on top of gnome so it's harder to classify popos 2104 as a gnome distribution because again it's taking on a bit of its own personality here so when it comes to pop os 2104 it's easier to forgive its absence of gnome 40 because its intended audience isn't necessarily someone who wants a vanilla gnome experience or the latest gnome experience is for someone who wants a good desktop experience and papa west definitely provides that here and when it comes to this particular review and most likely future reviews of papa west as well i can't really compare this distro against other gnome distros at this point because of its new personality and identity in the past fedora ubuntu and papa s would each release around the same time and in the past they would give you the latest gnome experience at that point in the cycle but that's not really been the case here ubuntu like i mentioned is giving you the older gnome experience they totally dropped the ball on gnome 40 and fedora gives you the latest and greatest gnome in their new release and papa s goes their own direction altogether so that means that i can't really put this in the same category and previously i announced that i thought that fedora 34 gives you the best gnome experience at this point and i still feel that way now but that doesn't mean that papaws 2104 isn't good it's actually great it's just in a completely different category and the category that i would put it in is a desktop centric distribution and i'm really eager to see what they come up with next because well this is the first release of cosmic and there's no telling what they're going to come up with next and even though i'm very fond of the cosmic desktop i do need to point out that it's going to likely create division in the linux community especially in the gnome community and i don't mean to imply that the new direction for papa west is a downside it's not i really do like it however i think a consequence of papaws claiming its own identity is that it'll most likely be a bit divisive i think a lot of people are going to love it but gnome purist will most likely despise it and people that are close to the gnome project itself will probably not enjoy the fact that their desktop environment is essentially becoming unrecognizable i mean yeah it is known under the hood so gnome is still present here but if pop os is the first gnome distribution that someone uses and then they go to a different distribution such as fedora that also ships gnome they're most likely going to be confused at all the features that are missing in vanilla gnome that is present here in popos however to be fair if gnomes developers would focus more on what their users actually want and expect the developers of papa west would most likely not feel forced to create the cosmic desktop in the first place and another quirk is the version number which is based on ubuntu's numbering scheme the way the version number breaks down is that the number 21 in the version number refers to the year 2021 while the four in the version number refers to the month in this case april however this particular version of popos is being released in june of 2021 so that's most likely going to confuse a few people the main reason why this version is numbered 2104 is because it's based on ubuntu 2104. the developers of popos decided to delay this release to make sure that everything is solid and that's not a downside i actually don't like the fact that ubuntu releases new versions on a set schedule despite any bugs that might be remaining the way i see it if it's not ready then why force it to be done when it's clearly not so if any distro decides to delay their release i stand behind them i mean just look at fedora they're late almost every single time and their distro is all the better for it but the only reason why i bring up the version number here is because whether or not it's justified it'll most likely confuse some people and i think that maybe papa west should adopt a new numbering scheme that's actually not going to be reliant on ubuntu's numbering scheme overall some minor quirks aside i've really enjoyed taking a look at papa west 2104 and after i finish editing this video i'm going to upgrade each of my computers because well i'm running popos on all of them anyway so i may as well upgrade so anyway i hope you enjoyed this review check out papa west 2104 i highly recommend it and i'll see you next time thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: Learn Linux TV

Views: 106,447

Keywords: Linux, Review, Distribution, Distro, Learn Linux, operating system, os, open-source, open source, gnu/linux, LearnLinuxTV, pop, pop os, pop!_os, 21.04, pop!_os 21.04, pop!_os 21.04 review, pop review, pop os review, linux laptop, linux desktop, cosmic, cosmic desktop, gnome, gnome desktop environment, gnome desktop, gnome shell, gnome extension, pop os 21.04, pop os 21.04 review, system 76, pop! os, popos 21.04, cosmic desktop environment, pop!_os cosmic, linux distro, linux 2021

Id: aID3UVTGlMo

Length: 20min 34sec (1234 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Chilicheesin]

I love Jay's videos because he is so thorough in explaining absolutely everything. Sometimes though it makes it a two part experience for me where I watch as much as I can the first time and finish the rest of the video later.

[u/midvok]

I absolutely love it, especially the tiling manager. I also prefer the small launcher window, because the vanilla full screen Gnome launcher kinda makes me dizzy (on a large monitor).

What PopOS makes here seems much more practical and comfortable than the default Gnome which is still messing with API and breaking essential extensions.

I would probably just replace the original panel with the dash-to-panel, which enables me to customize evey tiny detail I can wish to :)

[u/kamaleshbn]

For me gestures stopped working after a restart :(

Everything else is beautiful!

[u/TotesMessenger]

I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:

• [/r/u_no-coconut6064] pop_os_2104, just beautiful...

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