My Linux distro journey: from Ubuntu to Pop!_OS

July 28, 2022·4 min readLinux

When I first switched from Windows to Linux, I installed Ubuntu because that is what every "getting started with Linux" guide recommends. It worked fine for a while. But being a tinkerer, I could not resist trying other distributions to see what I was missing.

Starting with Ubuntu

Ubuntu is the safe choice. Massive community, tons of documentation, and most software has Ubuntu installation instructions. I used it as my daily driver for a few months and had no major complaints.

What pushed me to look elsewhere was Snap packages. Ubuntu increasingly ships software as Snaps, which are sandboxed packages that auto-update. In theory this is fine. In practice, Snap applications start slower, take more disk space, and the auto-update behavior cannot be disabled without removing Snap entirely. Firefox as a Snap was noticeably slower to launch than the native version.

Trying Fedora

Fedora appeals to people who want newer packages. It tracks closer to upstream releases, so you get newer kernel versions, newer GNOME, and newer everything. I used it for about two months.

What I liked: packages were more current, DNF (the package manager) worked well, and GNOME felt more polished than on Ubuntu.

What I did not like: some third-party software was harder to install. RPM Fusion helped, but the ecosystem of community guides was smaller than Ubuntu's. When something broke, finding a Fedora-specific fix took longer.

A week with Arch

I installed Arch because I wanted to understand how Linux actually works under the hood. The installation process teaches you more about Linux than months of using a preconfigured distribution. I manually partitioned drives, installed the bootloader, configured networking, and set up a desktop environment piece by piece.

I learned a lot, but maintaining Arch was more work than I wanted for a daily driver. Rolling releases mean updates can occasionally break things, and you need to read the news before updating. For a machine I depend on for work, stability matters more than having the absolute latest packages.

The Arch Wiki, however, is the best Linux documentation on the internet regardless of which distribution you use. I still reference it constantly.

Landing on Pop!_OS

Pop!_OS is made by System76 and is based on Ubuntu. It gives you Ubuntu's compatibility and package ecosystem without the Snap baggage. It uses Flatpak instead, which integrates better with the desktop and does not force auto-updates.

The built-in tiling window manager is what sealed it for me. I tried i3 on Arch and liked tiling, but configuring i3 from scratch was a project in itself. Pop!_OS gives you tiling as a toggle. Press one shortcut and windows tile automatically. Press it again and you are back to floating windows.

Other things that made me stay:

NVIDIA support. Pop!_OS has a dedicated ISO with NVIDIA drivers preinstalled. No PPAs, no manual driver installation, no black screen after updates.

Recovery partition. If something goes wrong, you can reinstall the OS without losing your home directory. I have used this once and it saved me hours.

Stability. It tracks Ubuntu LTS releases, so I get security updates without the risk of a rolling release breaking my workflow.

What I learned from distro hopping

Every distribution is Linux under the hood. The differences are in package management, default configurations, and desktop environment choices. Once you understand the fundamentals (file system layout, systemd, networking), switching distributions is straightforward.

But distro hopping for its own sake is a time sink. Pick something that works for your use case and commit to it. For me, that is Pop!_OS. It gives me tiling, stability, good hardware support, and Ubuntu compatibility. I have been on it for over a year now and have no plans to switch.