Pop!_OS 21.10 - Full Review!

[Music] hello again everyone and welcome back it's time for another distribution review i just love doing these i love checking out new linux distributions and today is especially awesome because we're going to be checking out popos 2110 which was released on december 14th i get asked all the time which distribution is my daily driver and the answer for several years actually has been popos i just love the quality of life improvements that pop os brings to the table it's definitely a great distribution for your laptop or desktop and we get to check out the latest release in this video so it's going to be a lot of fun version 2110 of the popular distro features a brand new application library that we'll be checking out shortly and it's also the first release of the project to be officially supported on the raspberry pi however we're going to be sticking to the x86 version in today's video i want to do a dedicated video about the raspberry pi version which i'll upload as soon as it's done but for right now let's go ahead and dive into popos 2110 first let's take a look at the installation process i installed popos 2110 on my lenovo thinkpad x1 extreme first generation and from what i can see the installer has changed very little if at all from previous releases just like always to get the process started you simply boot from a usb flash drive that you've written the installation image to and then you navigate through the various prompts the process is super simple and the install finished very fast for me in fact i think it's one of the fastest distribution installers out there however the installer could use a few new features i've always wanted it to give you an option to set the hostname for your machine during installation rather than forcing you to do it manually by default your machine will have a default hostname of pop os and if you rename that later as a lot of people do it's going to cause two entries to show up in your router or firewall dhcp lease table rather than just one entry now to be fair the inability to set the hostname during installation isn't really all that big of a deal so i'll give it a pass on that for now one feature that i really would like to see in the installer however is an ability to easily dual boot with another operating system it's not that you can't dual boot pop os they just don't have an option in the installer at this time to facilitate that process my understanding is that an option to install alongside your current operating system is on the roadmap so hopefully we'll see it next time around another option i wish was made easier in the installer was facilitating lvm i'm a big fan of installations using the logical volume manager it gives you the ability to resize online for example and sure that's not something that everyone will use but lvm also features things like snapshots as well so i would like to see that in the installer hopefully that's something they can add later so other than the fact that the installer could use a few more features it's very fast it's easy to use it gets the job done so overall i think the installer is a win after the installation process is complete and you log in for the first time you are presented with a welcome screen that will give you a chance to tune some additional settings such as language options the dock lighter dark mode and you can also individually toggle the workspaces and applications buttons as well so it's pretty neat that they give you the ability to customize these things right from the first login this welcome screen also gives you an option to log in to a decent selection of online services so that way you can log into something like your google account to sync your email and calendar or even set up your system to be able to log in via active directory also you'll see an option to toggle location services as well so you can feel free to turn that on if you plan on using an application that utilizes location data for those of you that haven't already used popos in the past i'm going to switch gears and give you an overview of some of the features that set it apart from other distributions popos just like many distributions out there utilizes gnome to provide the desktop environment however there are so many changes and improvements made to the gnome experience and pop that i no longer feel comfortable calling it gnome in order to set it apart from other distributions system 76 the company that makes pop os refers to their implementation of gnome as the cosmic desktop and cosmic refers to the customization that system 76 has made to gnome but is still gnome under the hood among the changes that are made against the default gnome experience is the fact that we have a panel at the bottom of the screen that shows shortcut icons as well as icons for running applications and on the top left of the screen we have a button for workspaces as well as accessing the application library and the application library is actually a new feature but we'll get into that in a moment in addition to tweaking gnomes layout they also customize the theme as well and i think it looks great especially when you compare it to the default gnome theme for example here's the gnome desktop running on fedora fedora doesn't change gnome's theme at all so what you're seeing here is the gnome desktop exactly as the developers intended i don't think it looks completely terrible but in my opinion it looks dated and bland popos by comparison is more modern and colorful there's many other tweaks and adjustments in popos as well it's really hard to go over every single feature in one video there's many quality of life improvements such as the ability to reinstall the entire distro without needing to reach for your installation media but perhaps my favorite of the pop specific features is auto tiling which you can enable by clicking the icon at the top right corner of the screen this one right here which ensures that every app that you have open makes efficient use of the available space on your display another feature i like a lot is the launcher which you can access by simply pressing the super key aka the windows key and you could use this launcher to quickly launch apps or even open files so far the features that i've been talking about in this section are not actually new to popos 2110 so what new features can we expect this time around well honestly not a lot papua s 2110 has fewer new features this time around than any previous release i can think of the biggest new feature in this version is the application library which is brand new to this release you can access it by clicking on applications at the top left corner of the screen and you could also access it by clicking on the grid icon on the panel or you can even hold super and press letter a when you open it the application library will show you some common applications on the first screen and you'll see some folders on the bottom of this window the purpose of the application library is to show you all of the applications that you have installed and it also gives you the ability to sort applications into folders so you could come up with your own custom layout for your applications if you wish and just like pretty much everything else in pop os the application library supports keyboard shortcuts as well for example you could press page up or page down to quickly switch between your app folders which essentially treats them as if they were tabs so i think this is a feature that quite a few people out there will probably enjoy however being able to sort applications into folders isn't exactly new we've been able to do that in gnome for quite a while now but the application library itself is a custom feature for popos and it does essentially the same thing as gnome's application menu but is implemented a bit better in my opinion i like it overall but i do have some mixed feelings about it first let's compare the application library to how launching applications normally works on the gnome desktop in on customized gnome the application launcher takes up the entire screen i've always hated this and gnome isn't the only user interface that does this to me it makes no sense for an operating system to use up the entirety of your monitor to display a list of applications this is jarring to the user experience because it completely covers up what the person was working on and takes them away from the workflow with the application library in popos it still takes up a sizeable amount of space on the screen but thankfully not the entire screen what's strange though is that the application library looks like a floating window since it's not visually connected to the button you click on to open it it literally looks like a separate floating window that you can't minimize or close but honestly that's probably a very minor complaint now there's potentially a bit of redundancy with the application library i mean the distribution provides us with both a launcher and an application library when should you use one versus the other the thing is both the application launcher and the application library enable you to open applications so generally they serve the same purpose but they go about it a bit differently so i think most people will probably favor one over the other the launcher which you can access by clicking on the icon or by pressing super enables you to launch not only applications but open files as well so if you already know the name of the application that you want to launch the application launcher is probably the best bet once you press super you start typing the name of the application or the file that you want to open and as you type it narrows down the list once you've narrowed down the list you can select the application or file that you want to open by clicking on it or by using your keyboard by comparison the application library doesn't give you the ability to open files it's only focused on applications so if you want to see a list of applications that you have installed the application library is probably the best bet for that however in my personal opinion i think it might make a bit more sense if they consolidated the launcher in the library into the same app for example perhaps they could put an icon on the application launcher to access the library that way you wouldn't need two icons on your panel that both enable you to launch applications but that's just a personal opinion having multiple ways of launching applications isn't exactly a bad thing when it comes to performance popos is very fast and i have no complaints about its responsiveness at all while this distribution wouldn't be a good fit for older computers you might have that have been in storage for over a decade it runs quite well on modern computers the goal of popos is not to revive your old windows xp computer that has 512 megabytes of ram it's a modern desktop that runs quite well on compatible hardware and speaking of compatibility i can happily confirm that yes installing steam works just fine the reason why i bring this up is because a recent video from linus tech tips showed a colossal failure while attempting to install steam but there was no issue for me whatsoever in fact i've never had an issue installing steam on any version of pop os so i can only speculate regarding how linus ended up in that position now i won't get into that here because my friend tom and i did an entire video where we talked about that definitely check that video out if you haven't already seen it and you would like to see a reaction based on linus's experiment under the hood popos 2110 is built on top of ubuntu 2110 which is as of the time of this recording the latest ubuntu base this means that papaos 2110 automatically inherits linux kernel 515 as well as everything else that ubuntu 2110 has to offer i mentioned earlier that popos utilizes gnome to provide the desktop environment but to be more specific papos 2110 ships gnome 40. unfortunately that means we're one major version of known behind so if you want the latest gnome experience you won't get that here and this is not the fault of system 76 ubuntu has dropped the ball on providing the latest gnome experience for two releases in a row and papa s just inherits whatever version of gnome that ubuntu happens to be shipping at any one time so since ubuntu is behind then unfortunately popo s is also behind it would have been great if popos 2110 shipped the latest version of gnome but then again gnome 41 doesn't really have all that many new features that are worth talking about so it's not that big of a loss now normally when i do my reviews i would consider out of date software to be a negative however i no longer consider popos a gnome distribution i mean sure that's what it uses under the hood but they customize gnome so much that it barely resembles the desktop that it originates from system 76 refers to their interface as the cosmic desktop and not gnome cosmic itself isn't considered a separate desktop environment but instead a customization layer on top of gnome itself for that reason i can't really hold it against this release for having an out of date version of gnome i mean there's so many custom tweaks and quality of life improvements in papa west that it may as well be a separate thing altogether in fact this might even be the last review of popos i do where i mention gnome at all i guess we'll see now something that might be a little confusing to some users out there is the version number it's version 2110 but what's the problem with that well the version number actually matches the version of ubuntu that this particular version is based on ubuntu 2110 the first digit represents the year 2021 and the second digit the month october but it's currently december so you could consider this version 2112 but that's not what they decided to call it now i do understand that system 76 is keeping 2110 in the name because ubuntu 2110 is what it's based on so it's not exactly wrong but it's not exactly right either it's a little confusing so if they're going to be a few months late with their release i do recommend that they change the version number to their own scheme however i do appreciate the fact that pop os releases when it's ready and they don't rush it out the door to meet a specific deadline unlike ubuntu overall papaws 2110 is actually a great release it doesn't have a ton of new features this time around but that's actually okay with me after all the purpose of a new release of papa s is not necessarily to shower you with new features but instead to serve as a new starting point that's synchronized to the latest ubuntu base in fact the official website is very clear on this in one of their information pages for popos it mentions that feature development in popos is not exclusive to any particular point release as we follow a rolling release strategy for updates to projects which we maintain so what that means is that a new feature released for the most current version of pop os is often back ported to the current lts release as well which is currently at version 2004 and new features can land at virtually any time they don't feel the need to withhold new features for the next stable version of the entire distribution so while we don't have a ton of new features to talk about at least right now that doesn't mean that there won't be something exciting to talk about later for example at one point in the past system 76 released support for hybrid graphics cards in the middle of a release cycle rather than waiting for the next release so you never know it might come our way so even though we don't have a ton of new features here i have no hesitation whatsoever recommending popos 2110 if you are currently using 2104 there's simply no reason not to upgrade if you're just starting out 2110 features the latest ubuntu base so it's compatible with a lot of newer hardware the quality of life improvements in this distro as well as its great performance and attention to detail make it a worthy choice for your computer any downsides i noticed here are all personal opinion and there have been no crashes or performance issues whatsoever during the time that i've spent with this release so even though there's not a lot of exciting new features to talk about in this release it was more about refinements all over the place and yes we did get the application library which is pretty cool but system 76 is in a bit of a transition state right now when it comes to this distribution because they're working on some exciting new technologies which might even culminate in their own desktop environment now nothing is set in stone right now but they are experimenting behind the scenes so there's no telling what might come next anyway i have some awesome content coming very soon that i can't wait to show you guys so make sure you are subscribed 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Channel: LearnLinuxTV

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Keywords: Linux, Review, Distribution, Distro, Learn Linux, LearnLinuxTV, linux, popos, system76, system 76, linux laptops, linux desktops, linux systems, pop os, pop os linux, pop os review, pop! os, pop os install, desktop environment, pop!_os, best linux, cosmic, pop os 21.10, pop os cosmic, pop os 21.10 review, pop os 2021, popos 21.10, pop os 21, linux review, operating system, linux distro, linux desktop, ubuntu 20.10, gnome desktop, gnome 40, cosmic desktop, pop!_os 21.10, 21.10

Id: hVFjV0zU8a0

Length: 17min 34sec (1054 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021