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Pop!_OS hardware compatibility
I want to upgrade my gaming setup, but I want to move towards a desktop replacement laptop for the compact form factor to free up desk space or even get rid of a desk altogether. I also want to try out Pop!_OS since I know it has good Nvidia drivers and that most games are compatible with Linux nowadays.
Has anyone had any experience with switching to Pop!_OS from Windows? What is software compatibility like? Pros and cons?
Also is anyone here using an 18 inch gaming laptop? I'm interested in huge laptops since I'm not really planning on taking it on the go.
I game on Linux. Most things work unless they have anti-cheat software. But I don't really play multiplayer, so it works just fine for me.
To answer your question, Pop! will work just fine. Most of the major distros have support for Nvidia drivers and other components out of the box. In my experience, Pop! gets unstable in the long run, but if you fall down the Linux rabbit hole, you'll probably enter a phase where you try a new distro every couple of weeks, so stability doesn't matter too much.
A great resource for troubleshooting games on Linux is protondb.com. People much smarter than me share their fixes, and you can just follow their instructions. Also, check out RetroArch if you want to play older games.
I have a 17” Oryx Pro from 2019. Pop!_OS was my first full-time Linux distro (I ran Manjaro a bit beforehand but that was more about rescuing old hardware than being a daily driver).
Pop!_OS is easy. GNOME seems to get a lot of hate, and I’m sure some of that is valid, especially from people who like or need something highly customized, but for someone who wants my computer to “just work”, it’s great. I don’t have to do a lot of fiddling, and it looks simple and elegant by default. It is worth noting that Pop!_OS will be shifting over to their home-grown COSMIC in the future, so all that might change eventually. I trust that System76 knows what they’re doing, so I’m looking forward to it.
In terms of getting used to GNOME, and specifically Pop!_OS’s spin of it (which is tweaked a bit from vanilla GNOME), it’s different than Windows but not anything prohibitive. There’ll be a small adjustment period but it’ll soon become second nature. I actually like it better: they have an easy-to-use (optional) tiling system that I wish I had on my Windows laptop at work.
Installing software goes through the Pop!_Shop, which lets you install deb packages and flatpaks. 90% of what I need is in there, so software availability and installation is easy. The software for the Pop!_Shop is admittedly not great, and it's probably the primary complaint people have about the distro. Don't get me wrong: it works, but it's clunky. Outside of deb and flatpak, you have to manually install Snap if you want to use any of those, and AppImages work as well.
Gaming is great. Between Pop!_OS’s good handling of NVIDIA drivers and Steam’s amazing work on Proton, I can run nearly any game I want. And if I can’t run a certain game, well, I have plenty of others to play instead.
Hardware is not great. When I first bought it, I had a fatal motherboard issue and I had to send it back and get it fixed under warranty. To System76’s credit, their support was awesome through the entire process. It now works fine, but it gets hot when gaming (which I’m not mad about — I get that heat’s going to happen in a gaming laptop). I have it permanently living on a laptop cooler fan. Like you, I don’t take it anywhere so it’s a desktop replacement for me.
Prices are also high. I justified this to myself two ways. One is the idea that I like supporting a company that is supporting Linux. The other is that the initial difference in cost between their laptops and other models seems big upfront but becomes effectively negligible when amortized over the life of the device. I’ve used my laptop for thousands of hours and will likely get thousands more out of it. The extra cost I’ve paid has been worth it to me, because my experience with it is consistently smooth.
So, despite their high price and the hardware not being the best, I still would recommend getting something from System76 — especially if you’re considering Pop!_OS directly. I’ve read about other people having issues, particularly hardware and driver issues, installing it on other bases. The benefit of getting S76 model is that it’s pretty frictionless, as they make sure the distro works directly with all of their hardware. You also can get support from them if anything does go wrong (which, as previously mentioned, they’re great about!).
If you have any specific questions about Pop!_OS or the hardware, please ask! I’m happy to help.
EDIT:
I just realized you’re talking about moving an existing laptop to Pop!_OS rather than getting a new one. Sorry about that! My bad. Ignore all the parts of my comment that are irrelevant to your situation.EDIT EDIT: I was wrong again! Disregard my previous disregarding.
Yeah I was considering getting a laptop from S76, but I couldn't find much online about the quality of their hardware besides cooling issues. I was looking at the alienware m18 because I know they know how to make a solid laptop, but also can't find much about compatibility there. Do the S76 laptops feel cheap? I know the internal hardware is good, but I would want to possibly use the keyboard and screen instead of just docking it.
I wouldn’t say it feels cheap — maybe just generic? It’s not flashy, but it gets the job done. Also, take my opinion with a grain of salt. I’m a more casual user than 99% of people who run Linux. I don't have a lot of strong preferences on what I'm using as long as it can get me online and let me play my games.
There definitely are people who have hardware issues. You can check r/System76 to get a feel for some of them. It’s hard to know if they have more or less than other vendors though, in part because issues are often what prompt people to post in the first place. You don’t often hear about people who don’t have problems because they’re busy enjoying their laptops rather than having to try and troubleshoot things or share their frustrations online. I also feel like this holds true for other vendors too. Every laptop line is going to have a non-zero number of faulty or broken models. You can find hardware horror stories for practically anything if you go looking for them, which makes it hard to assess reliability just by looking through related online posts.
Even as happy as I am with their hardware, I can’t deny that mine developed a critical error that required a motherboard replacement less than a year in. If that had happened out of warranty (or if the replacement had been more painful), then I would likely be a lot less happy. Outside of that one problem though, I have no complaints. Everything is still running great, my computer is still as snappy as it was on day one, and the only wear and tear I notice is that I’m losing some paint on some of my keys.
And I do want to get a new laptop, so I'm looking for recommendations for new hardware that will work well with linux.
Star labs is another maker worth checking out. They make laptops with some interesting features, and all of them run on coreboot, a secure open source Linux focused bios system (which System76 also uses)
I’ve been using linux as my only os for a long time, except gaming. There are games that just don’t work or are too much work to get going, so if gaming is your main activity for the PC, I suggest (at least to start) dual booting.
I’ve only had hw issues with broadcom wifi and lte. My experience is that if the hw is supported on ubuntu, you’ll have no issues on Pop OS
I have been using Pop!_OS and have been extremely happy - so much so that I actually invested in several high end System76 workstations for my work. Pop!_OS just works and it works really, really well. Setting up Pop!_OS has been very easy on the 5+ systems I have installed it on. The OS's GNOME setup called COSMIC is simple to use and I personally find it very productive.
The compatibility with NVIDIA has been a major reason why I have been so happy with Pop!_OS. I do a lot of machine learning/deep learning, and getting the OS set up on systems with NVIDIA cards was almost too easy - everything installed and worked without fudging. I recently set up a new workstation - from the start of install to testing out my machine learning code took about 2.5 hours (and most of that time was spent watching the install).
The other thing that I should mention is upgrading the OS. I used to run Ubuntu on computers and almost every time I would try to upgrade between releases something would fundamentally break irrecoverably. So far Pop!_OS has upgrade well each time.
Software wise, I mostly live in Linux running Linux applications, so I am not sure about Proton/Steam/etc. But if your workflow uses mostly FOSS, you'll be fine.
I game on Linux (both desktop and Steam deck) and I've used both vanilla Ubuntu and Pop! OS, and genuinely the experience is very good. Pop! OS is definitely easier if you have an Nvidia graphics card but otherwise they're both fine and I've had no non-Nvidia related problems with my desktops. Game support is also very good -- VR and some big multiplayer games with anti-cheat are really the only things where Linux is still sub-par nowadays. If either of those is a thing you're into, do more research into specific games. But overall Proton is very good these days and other than those specific instances it's very easy to play almost anything on Linux these days. On Steam deck I more often have issues with games' controller compatibility than with Linux/Proton.
I would say, if you have a wireless controller you want to use with your PC, look into how well it's supported on Linux. My old xbox 360 one worked fine bc it used a plug-in dongle, but my xbox one controller currently needs me to do finagling with bluetooth drivers to use it wirelessly (luckily it works fine plugged-in so I was able to procrastinate on that). But even that's honestly a pretty minor thing and there are people putting a lot of work on the open-source versions of drivers for stuff like that.
I've been using Pop! for my main/gaming distro for five or so years and have been quite happy with it. That being said, I am on a desktop and I can't confirm how it works with new desktop replacement laptops.
It’s remarkable how far we’ve come in a relatively short space of time, that if your run a modern distro on modern hardware, so long as you’re not bleeding edge, generally you will be fine.
My recommendation before you take the leap would be to research your must have software apps for compatibility issues before taking the plunge.
If you’re a destiny 2 or Fortnite player, for example, or do most of your gaming via gamepass, you aren’t going to stick with it for long.
The same could be said if you’re a big MS user as the office suite issues are still prevalent, despite excellent progress on open source office productivity apps. There are workarounds, but there is still a usability tax for running Linux.
On the hardware front, I have a Dell G9 which is monstrous and would probably qualify as a lethal weapon should I attack someone with it. It runs fine, but gets on my tits because battery life is shocking and it needs more than 100W so can’t charge over USB-C - even if your charger can push more than 100W. It has an RTX 20 something in it, and can natively run games like Elden Ring at 1080P with dials cranked to the top without dropping below 60FPS.
My current main laptop is an M1 MBP for reasons, but my next home machine will be a Framework 16 which will replace the MBP, my real gaming desktop and the G9… Hopefully!
I know there are battery issues but I love the idea of upgrading a laptop instead of producing more ewaste on a cyclical basis.
One other suggestion would be to take the plunge on a steam deck. You can try everything out for a few hundred notes and at the end of it, your worst case scenario is that you will have one of the best handheld gaming devices that has ever been released (IMHO).