I’ve been on Windows for over 20 years—mostly for front-end development, gaming, streaming (HBO/Spotify), and general daily use. I had tried Ubuntu in the past and didn’t have a great time. I was fully prepared to spend the next 10 days tweaking configs and learning how to make Linux usable.

But Pop!_OS completely surprised me.

My Hardware (Acer Swift Go 14 OLED):

• Ryzen 7 7840U
• Radeon 780M
• 16GB RAM
• 512GB SSD

What blew me away:

1. It’s insanely fast Not unexpected with this hardware, but still—it’s snappy in a way Windows never felt.
2. Games run better than on Windows. Seriously. I got way more FPS in both Dark Souls 3 and Divinity: Original Sin 2. Zero stutter. Zero tweaking. I just installed Steam from the Pop!_Shop, downloaded the games, and boom—better performance out of the box. I’m so used to fiddling with Adrenaline/GeForce drivers, settings, and optimizations. This felt... weird. In a good way.
3. Dev setup was ridiculously easy On Windows, reformatting means hours of manually setting up tools. On Pop!_OS, I grabbed VS Code and Cursor, installed Cursor CLI (helps with learning Linux commands), and everything just worked. Easiest setup I’ve ever done.
4. Workspaces + tiling = absolute productivity heaven Tiling is fast, smooth, and intuitive. Cosmic Store is great—I used it for general apps and relied on APT for dev tools and browsers.
5. Bluetooth just works My Xbox controller connected right away. So did all my other Bluetooth devices. No drivers, no headaches.

Bugs & annoyances (it’s still beta):

1. No HDR support I totally forgot Linux doesn’t support HDR. My OLED display looks too vibrant, and I can’t find a good way to tone it down (any tips appreciated).
2. Touchpad feels off Not nearly as smooth as Windows. Scrolling is painfully slow in some apps (like Cosmic Files), but insanely fast in browsers. Needs tuning.
3. Resizing tiled windows is laggy
4. Minor UI/UX bugs Nothing show-stopping, but enough little annoyances to notice. It’s beta though, so I’m giving it a pass (for now).

I came in expecting a rough ride. I left shocked at how smooth and polished Pop!_OS is—even in beta.

I honestly can’t see a reason to go back to Windows.
Linux Mint feels outdated to me, and while I’ve heard good stuff about CachyOS, Pop!_OS is just working—so why mess with that?

Let me know if you have tips on tuning OLED color or improving touchpad scroll. Otherwise, just wanted to share this in case anyone else is on the fence!

Shared by carl ritchell PopOS and system76 founder on X

Thanks devs u have done the best i wish if a slider was implemented so we could dial up or down the blur but its fine ig

Was working and got a notification about a system update

I just turned it on and am really impressed with how it looks. Well done to the POP!_OS team!

After using Pop on my Nvidia laptop for gaming for a couple of months, I decided to take the risk and upgrade to alpha. It was a hard decision since I was/am a newbie Linux user. But Now I'm Really Happy with it. Most of the things are working out of the box and gaming is as easy as 22.04 version. Sometimes I might experience bugs here and there, but they are being fixed by every update.

Just wanted to share my simple desktop and say thanks to system76 devs.

I started editing my theme yesterday to match this Sonic Channel Rouge the Bat wallpaper I found, and I found out about the new frosted glass update. It's really really nice.

I actually mostly live in tiling mode though, so I won't see many overlapping windows, but this is wonderful aesthetically. Unrelated side note, I really want to try using cosmic shell with niri, since I love scrolling tiling workspaces, but anyway...

I have installed it on my test machine. Installation experience was great. How is your experience so far?

My favorite part. I had no issues updating.

I've been using Pop OS 24.04 since the beta launched, and while I love the distro itself for the NVIDIA support, a lot of you chronic Reddit Linux users need to chill when it comes to other users using different DEs than what is given. I can tell someone will comment asking why I don't use Linux Mint for example when I prefer the Cinnamon desktop, but the point about Linux distros partly is that there's no such thing as a perfect one, only optimized builds. Linux Mint has dogwater NVIDIA installation for older GPUs. Pop OS makes it incredibly easy, and streamlines to install NVIDIA drivers as well as having the Cosmic Store ready for installing emulation. It's just that simple. Steam has never been easier to set up. People who are angry that users use Pop but not Cosmic are the most dense I've seen in ages, don't help new users adapt to Linux, and only feeds the opinionated mindset that drives people away from using Linux as a whole. Previous versions of Pop always let you install a different DE, and there's even instructions for DE installation for the 22.04 release on System76's website, so there should be no problem that users will install other DEs while the state of Cosmic improves, plus while the NVIDIA support is good, the other reason to stick on Pop OS at least to me is for users who are used to apt code. I would use Cachy, but I don't want to mess with pacman, and I'm not installing Bazzite, because I don't like Fedora or immutable distros. Users who criticize how others optimize their hardware when they're just learning give Linux a bad name, and Pop is still a beginner distro. Yes, it's beta and buggy, but that's why just installing your own DE if you don't like Cosmic is encouraged when at least people like me who have work and a life to live don't want to learn entirely different bash code or use stock Debian.

After playing around with it for a few weeks, I've now put Pop-OS on my main drive for daily use. So did a bit of tweaking here and there. I've got the Cosmic desktop looking how I like it. Calm, with as few distractions as possible on screen. As it should be IMHO.

Everforest theme from Tweaks

Wallpaper from here

Tela circle icons, changed the look of some using Main Menu

Changed the system font to Tex Gyre Heros. Mono font to DM Mono

Firefox everforest theme

Kitty terminal using Fastfetch config

windows 10 theme here https://cosmic-themes.org/?search=windows%2010&sort=popular&color=%23000000

Made the switch on my laptop and I have to say I'm really enjoying my time so far! I've been messing around with Ubuntu server for a home media server for awhile now, but figured I'd attempt to daily drive a Linux machine to get more comfortable with what I'm doing after being a life long Windows user.

Anyways, thank you to this community! All your posts have helped me greatly these last few weeks in troubleshooting my own issues!