Pop!_OS — Good Stuff!

June 26, 2021

Why we settled on Pop!_OS as a daily-driver Linux distribution for development work.

A quick note: this post is a little older, and newer releases introduced the Cosmic desktop, which moves what were formerly desktop extensions into the default setup. We are not entirely sold on that direction — the further a distribution drifts from vanilla GNOME, the more tempting a more minimal base becomes.

We are not big on distro-hopping and are, by nature, resistant to change. The more time we spend figuring out how to do something, the less time we are actually doing it. So we have our habits, our muscle memory and our routine. Changing text editors is traumatic; changing key bindings is inconceivable. Or it was.

The Road Here

After an unfortunate early experience with Arch — we got there in the end, but the wiki grind wore us down — we moved to the simpler Ubuntu and quickly developed a dislike for its old Unity desktop. So we hopped over to Mint and the genuinely pretty Cinnamon desktop. Wouldn't you know it, Ubuntu dropped Unity for GNOME a year later. It turned out GNOME was what we had wanted all along.

The Problem With Comfort

Mint was good to us. We used it for a bunch of releases, built a ton of sites and apps, and made it home. And, in the end, that was the problem. Nobody needs five versions of PHP and as many versions of Ruby. We were node-package-managed and Composer-ed to death — Apache, NGINX, MongoDB, MySQL, and every front-end framework you can name, all on localhost. Years of that accumulate.

Just as important, but harder to define, was a growing feeling of being crowded. Icons were strewn about the desktop, the dock was an endless row of half-used utilities, and the home directory was full of folders named things like Last-Final-02 and Desktop-junk-001. All the while we were pulling updates from repositories added years earlier for some obscure app used exactly twice. It was, frankly, horrible.

A Clean Slate

Now we know more, and it was time to start fresh. Pop!_OS gave us a clean, GNOME-based foundation with sensible defaults, good hardware support and a tiling workflow that suits development. More than any single feature, though, the real win was the discipline of a clean slate — keeping only the tools we actually use, and finally learning enough about containers to stop installing five of everything directly on the host.

The lesson generalizes well beyond Linux: whether it is an operating system or a website, cruft accumulates, and periodically clearing it out is one of the healthiest things you can do. It is the same philosophy we bring to every site we build.