Why Pop!_OS is my Linux distro of choice

December 8, 2025·3 min readLinux

I have tried a lot of Linux distributions. Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Manjaro, elementary OS. They all work, but Pop!_OS is the one I keep coming back to. It gets out of my way faster than anything else I have used.

What Pop!_OS actually is

Pop!_OS is made by System76, a company that builds Linux laptops and desktops. It is based on Ubuntu, so you get the same package repositories and compatibility, but with a custom desktop experience and some genuinely useful additions.

The tiling window manager

This is the killer feature. Pop!_OS has a built-in tiling window manager that you can toggle on and off. When it is on, windows automatically arrange themselves without overlapping. When you need floating windows, one keyboard shortcut toggles it off.

For development, this is huge. Terminal on the left, editor on the right, browser below. No manual resizing, no dragging windows around. The keyboard shortcuts for moving and resizing tiled windows are intuitive once you learn them.

I have used i3 and sway before. They are powerful but require significant configuration. Pop!_OS gives you 80% of the benefit with zero config.

Hardware support

Because System76 makes their own hardware, Pop!_OS has excellent driver support. NVIDIA drivers are handled through a dedicated ISO variant. No PPAs, no manual kernel module installation, no prayer that the next update does not break your display.

This extends beyond System76 hardware. I run Pop!_OS on a ThinkPad and everything works out of the box: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, suspend/resume, external displays.

Developer experience

Pop!_OS ships with sane defaults for developers. The terminal is configured well, the package manager works reliably, and system updates rarely break things. It also includes a recovery partition that lets you reinstall the OS without losing your home directory, which has saved me once.

The Pop!_Shop (their software center) is decent for GUI apps, but I use the terminal for package management anyway. Since it is Ubuntu-based, apt works exactly as expected, and most developer tools have Ubuntu installation instructions.

Flatpak support

Pop!_OS uses Flatpak instead of Snap. This matters because Flatpak apps integrate better with the system theme, start faster, and do not have the auto-update behavior that Snap forces on you. For apps like VS Code, Slack, or Discord, Flatpak just works better on the desktop.

If you want bleeding-edge packages, Arch or Fedora are better choices. Pop!_OS tracks Ubuntu LTS releases, so packages can be a few versions behind. For most development work this does not matter since you manage your own Node, Python, and Rust toolchains anyway.

If you enjoy deep customization and building your system from scratch, Arch is more your speed. Pop!_OS is opinionated and that is the point.

The bottom line

Pop!_OS is the best "just works" Linux distribution I have found for development. The tiling window manager alone is worth the switch, and the Ubuntu base means you are never far from a solution when something goes wrong.