Strange Pop! OS 24.04 behavior
I have a computer that is not quite powerful enough to run my flight simulators, but which is still quite capable. I tried to sell it for close to what I bought it for, after using it maybe 50 hours, but the stink of "used" was on it, so I only got low ball offers for the system as a whole. Selling the individual components would be better but take substantially more effort. Instead, after finding an absurdly good 64 GB RAM deal ($150 for DDR4, in early December, crazy), I decided to use it to educate myself on some work-adjacent science simulation capabilities, putting it at home to avoid the feeling like I'm doing work (and also so I can install nonsense on it if I want).
I settled on Pop! OS, after finding out it has the best NVIDIA GPU support of the .deb Linux family, and installed 22.04 on it last month. After a standard "oops I messed something up on a new-to-me Linux distro, might as well wipe it," I reset the bios to see if it fixed things, then loaded 24.04 on a live USB and ran the update at POST.
24.04 made some very big changes to Pop! OS, which I won't list, other than one that puzzles me. After installing, I ran Geekbench 6 to benchmark it, and I found out my system CPU performance was about 33% down from the prior benchmark. I rationalized this as being due to no XMP being on, and tried to enter BIOS on boot...but Pop24 refused to enter BIOS, and my motherboard didn't even POST? But it would load into Pop24 without issue? So I was stuck without a way to tune my system. I eventually removed the SSD, hard wiped it on a separate device, and reinstalled Pop22, whereafter I was able to enter BIOS and enable XMP. Performance was restored, and even better than ever.
My question...why is Pop24 different? I tried to disable fastboot. I tried to have it use systemctl to reboot into settings. I tried everything I could find online. The best guess I have is something to do with UEFI? But I have no clue. I'm not really a computer guy, I just futz around, and I don't know what I'm doing.
I might be too behind in my knowledge to know (maybe UEFI changes things?), but I'm curious why the OS was interfering with access to the BIOS at all, since the BIOS is on a chip on the motherboard and can be accessed without an OS or drive even present, typically with a certain keypress during boot, before the OS even has a chance to load (and without a drive connected at all, often will boot directly into the BIOS without input)
It's difficult to know for sure why the performance was heavily affected, your hunch there is not necessarily a bad one (could be that, could be other settings, could be a driver issue, power management, etc), but it's odd to me that with 24.04 installed that you had difficulty accessing the BIOS as that's not something I would think should be affected by a particular OS or version at all
The only explanation I have is that the OS isn't really shutting down/rebooting, it is actually suspending to RAM/disk. If it does either, it's possible that it won't ever go back to the part in the boot sequence where you could reach the bios.
I have no experience with Pop!, but there are numerous ways to force a hard reboot, which absolutely should allow access to POST and bios.
If you’re struggling to get into the bios, unhook the drive with the OS and start the PC. Without the drive, you should be able to figure out how to get in.
Two things stand out to me, the claim that Pop! OS should support nvidia better. Which seems suspect to me, the nvidia drivers are closed source (the ones that perform well anyway) and provided by nvidia. I have a hard time believing there is a substantial differences between distros.
The second one is that you use Pop! OS ;) Which is to say, that anecdotally it is the distro I see people most often have completely random stuff happen with online.
I'd say, give a different distro a go and see if the claims about Nvidia performance are actually true. If you like the debian family mint, ubuntu, etc should all just work. You just need to make sure you choose the option to install proprietary drivers and codecs upon installation.
Pop OS! has the best Nvidia GPU support out of the box. I doesn't do anything particularly special, it just saves some configuration steps if you have an Nvidia gaming GPU. It has nothing to do with performance.
I had similar fights with pop recently and ended up just switching to Kubuntu. Now I'm having a much better time with basically the same performance. I see people mention pop is supposed to be good for nvidia machines but as far as I could tell the only benefit was nvidia drivers come preinstalled. So unless there's some secret tweaks they've made I'm not sure what benefit it has over any other distro for nvidia GPU.
I definitely had a worse experience weird-bugs-wise when on a small Ubuntu flavor with a non-default DE than I have with Pop!OS, but it's not without its quirks bug-wise. I'm also still using 22.04, which uses their Gnome-with-changes DE, which I assume was another reason to use it over other Ubuntu flavors for people (and while I haven't tried their new Cosmic DE yet, I assume it is similarly intended to be a draw). I think using one of the main Ubuntu flavors with Nvidia drivers would get you a similar experience.
I'll be honest, I am not sure what you are specifically responding to here. Both Ubuntu and Mint are bigger than Pop! OS as far as I am aware. Mint does have a custom DE, Cinnamon. But that was forked from Gnome shell and has been supported since 2011 and is overal fairly stable. In fact, it is often the distro recommended to people looking for a stable experience.
Edit: Realized my comment comes of a bit more combative than I might intend. It is more mild confusion on my side as I just mentioned Ubuntu and Mint and it did seem a response to that.
My comment was comparing my experience with a less mainstream flavor of Ubuntu with a different DE (not one of the mainstream ones like normal Ubuntu with Gnome or Kunbuntu with KDE) as having been worse with annoying bugs than Pop!OS has been, while agreeing that Pop! does have its weird bugs still and that the mainstream Ubuntu flavors with Nvidia drivers are probably at worst equally stable as Pop!OS (if not more stable tbqh). I also commented that aside from coming packaged with Nvidia drivers, the other reason one might choose Pop!OS is for the DE (either the new Cosmic or old Cosmic aka Gnome with some nice tweaks), more as an aside on why else someone would pick it instead of just installing Nvidia drivers with a different Ubuntu flavor.
It really shouldn't make a difference in regards to getting into BIOS. The only think I could imagine is some weird quirk of how the system was (or wasn't) reading your keyboard?
Also +1 for what @creesch said about the Nvidia drivers. The only the PopOS does vs most other distros is package the non-free drivers and enable them by default.
I like both the DE in the 22.04 release and the Cosmic beta, but that beta still has some pretty rough edges...
Actually, I believe there were a couple of other things they did regarding Nvidia including some things related to shaders, but it was still just configuration related stuff that people on Ubuntu and Mint were already doing post install.
And it seems to break whenever I update the Nvidia drivers in my case.
Sure, “Maybe I should’ve waited longer” could’ve been the answer but before I sacked Pop_OS! For NixOS, my update routine if Nvidia drivers are involved has been
Update->Wait a bit->Screen turns black->Restart->Enter TTY->Repair dpkg->Reboot and use the DE.
Pop! OS 24.04 is the first version that ships with their new Cosmic desktop (their own desktop, not the GNOME skin which is also confusingly named Cosmic). According to System76, it is stable enough for a full release, but it will of course be different and less polished than other established desktops. That being said, that shouldn't really interfere with you getting into the bios menu. Wouldn't hurt to ask on the relevant forums.
If you are looking for something with good driver support, you could look into Bazzite if you don't mind an immutable distro.
I have used Pop OS! quite a bit, and only recently switched away on my main desktop. I suspect the reason you are seeing issues due to 24.04 being the version where they finally bit the bullet and ran with their new home grown DE (Cosmic) as the default. I tried it during the beta phase and I didn't care for it and I surely didn't think it was stable enough to be something that I'd use all of the time. It was the main reason I switched backed to Mint.
You're probably using systemd-boot rather than grub. Next time it happens try this
https://old.reddit.com/r/pop_os/comments/162ah6g/what_is_the_spacebar_method/