Pop! OS - Good Stuff!

Update 8/26/2021: this post is a lit­tle old­er and the cur­rent ver­sion of Pop (21.04) intro­duces the Cos­mic desk­top. Cos­mic moves what were for­mer­ly GNOME exten­sions spe­cif­ic to POP into the default set­up. I’m not sold on this and the fur­ther they move from vanil­la GNOME the hard­er I’m look­ing at Arch or Debian.

I’m not real big on dis­tro hop­ping and am, by nature, resis­tant to change.

The more time I spend fig­ur­ing out how to do some­thing, the less time I’m spend­ing doing it. So I have my habits, mus­cle mem­o­ry and rou­tine. Chang­ing text edi­tors is trau­mat­ic, chang­ing key­bind­ings is incon­ceiv­able. Or was.

After an unfor­tu­nate expe­ri­ence with Arch (I got it in the end, but man, did I get tired of the wiki) I moved to the sim­pler Ubun­tu and quick­ly devel­oped a loathing for the the Uni­ty desk­top so hopped on over to Mint and the pret­ty pret­ty Cin­na­mon desktop. 

Would­n’t you know, Ubun­tu dumped Uni­ty for GNOME a year lat­er. I just now fig­ured out it was GNOME I want­ed all along.

Mint was good to me. I used it for a bunch of ver­sions, built a ton of sites and apps and made it my bitch. For years.

And, in the end, that was the prob­lem. Nobody needs five ver­sions of PHP and as many ver­sions of Ruby. I was node pack­age man­aged and com­posed to death. Apache, NGINX, Mon­goDB, MySQL. Angu­lar, Vue and React. Pick a stack, we got ​‘em all. All on localhost.

I did­n’t know much about containers.

Anoth­er, just as impor­tant but hard­er to define part of my deci­sion was that I start­ed to feel crowd­ed. I had icons strewn about my desk­top and my dock was an end­less row of apps and use­less util­i­ties. My home direc­to­ry was filled with fold­ers named Last­Last­Fi­nal-02 – 12-09 and Desk­topCrap-001, and, my favorite Worthless_​Old_​Shit. All the while I’m updat­ing from PPA’s I added years ago for some obscure app I prob­a­bly used twice.

It was horrible.

It was like Windows.

Now I know more and it was time for a clean slate. So I spent the bet­ter part of a day back­ing up that three year old home direc­to­ry and went dis­tro shopping.

That’s the why. The rest will follow.