Pop!_OS

Reader supplied reviews for Pop!_OS Average rating 7.9 from 323 review(s) Please select a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on Pop!_OS? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 24.0422.0421.1021.0420.1020.0419.1019.0418.1018.0417.10 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 24.04 Rating: 6 Date: 2026-04-02 Country: Canada Votes: 1 I find it odd that Pop Os has a good Intel chip compatability. The 24.04 version had issues with screen rotation and onscreen keyboard after the surface kernel installation. I tried to find solution in every corner of the net for it but to no aval. I find that the touch screen is very responsive but without the screen rotation and the onboard keyboard working, this operating system in Surface Pro 6 is not good enough. I also tried using the Gnome Extension app at the cosmic store, all the extensions I tried are all incompatible with the 24.04 build. what the heck Pop OS? if you want to be better, make those things work and provide at least a link for the solution. I am disappointed at this point and going back to Ubuntu. it may be sluggish for me but everything works like a charm. The only thing that turns me off with Ubuntu is the latency and thats all. Please, provide us Surface Pro users solution to these issues. just a link, we will be happy...Cheers Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 24.04 Rating: 7 Date: 2026-04-02 Country: Canada Votes: 1 It's good, I like it. The desktop is definitely more of a beta at the moment, so viewer discretion is advised. It is currently going through a transition period, so I wouldn't advise you to use this if you're doing a "let's try Linux" challenge. That said, it is improving day-by-day and I no longer find things that can't be done in it. I can play Windows games thanks to Steam on Cosmic. I can run VSCode and all my Electron apps. It's not very performant due to the desktop being so new and I still prefer Nautilus over Cosmic Files and some of its apps are a little bare, but it's functional. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 24.04 Rating: 7 Date: 2026-03-26 Country: Germany Votes: 10 Ryzen 9800X3D RTX 4090 + RTX 5090 What I wanted in an OS: Ubuntu-based, non-Gnome, non-snap, with flatpaks, with Wayland, with Nvidia drivers enabled in the installer. There are two OSes that I could find that fulfill these requirements, Pop!_OS is one of them*. OK so, I drove Pop!_OS 24.04 on a daily basis for more than a month. I moved everything to it, work, games, LLM. Work: requires Citrix Workspace Games: Steam + GOG (in the form of Heroic Launcher) LLM: LM-Studio with local models, running across both GPUs The good up front: As a Ubuntu-based distribution, it's all here. Citrix Workspace App works, halleluja. To this, Pop!_OS brings it's own desktop environment named COSMIC. It's brand new, and it is the DE that is delivered with Pop!_OS 24.04, and going forward. I was very taken with the simplicity and aethetics of COSMIC. It is fast. And the great, great ability of COSMIC is that is a combined windowed and tiled desktop, which is seamlessly integrated, and better than any other DE I've ever used. You can use the tiling or not, you can switch between windows, stacked, and tiled modes, and it doesn't break. The tiling mode layouts are excellent. It works flawlessly. I LOVE IT. LM-Studio and other LLM tools work fine. I ended up installing the Nvidia drivers directly, and that takes care of providing all of the CUDA libraries, I had no issues. The (big) problems: COSMIC, eventhough it is awesome, is in a Beta state. Despite being the standard DE of Pop!_OS, it has some serious flaws. There is a lack of internationalization, no on-screen keyboard, the COMSMIC apps are primative and full of bugs (COSMIC Files has very big issues, and it is the default filemanager), and for example setting other default apps doesn't work, meaning the big problems with the COSMIC Files app can't be circumvented, because anything that doesn't have its own filemanagement implementation will use COSMIC files by force. You will scream when the 10th time in a day COSMIC files starts, does not remember any settings, windows size, resets to sort by date, and does not give you a button to select / or anything else without having to manually edit the path bar! (Wow, it is bad!) COSMIC, running on Wayland, has some problems with Citrix. Client DPI scaling for high DPI displays does not work. I dual boot to other X11 and Wayland distributions and it does work, so we know it is possible, just not on COSMIC right now. Gaming on Steam and Heroic worked as expected, but there big issues with the mouse becoming either hyper sensitive (flipping all over) or not being recognized in the games at all. The solution can often be to use Super-F11, to switch between windowed and fullscreen mode, and if you do that a couple times, it tends to work. Yeah, that's rather Beta. I had a discussion on the r/pop_os with one of the developers, where the developer clearly stated that gaming is not a focus of COSMIC in the first year or two, and infact is not on the development timeline. Pop!_OS is business, scientific, and developer OS we were told. This is good to know. It means give them time, a year or two, and I am sure COSMIC will turn into something even better than it is right now in this early unfinished stage. Pop!OS, which I like alot, but because of the raw state COSMIC, is now not on daily use on my system, and gets booted every few weeks to get updates and check how the progress is. *If anyone wants to know, currently I am using Tuxedo OS on the desktop, very very similar to Pop!OS, but with KDE instead of COSMIC. I am still evaluting it. KDE is much much more bug-free than COSMIC, that much is clear already. Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 323 reader reviews of Pop!_OS...