Pop!_OS! 20.04 - My First Impressions

Obtain the ISO

A fairly painless process of just downloading it from their official website. They offer two versions with the graphics drivers pre-installed. Yes Please ! I grabbed the nvidia version and createdt an ISO using ROSA Image writer. It was done in a couple of minutes.

After booting from the USB I was greeted with a very bright looking desktop. Perhaps a little too bright for my taste. I wasn't sure how I was going to do the partitioning yet so I was pleased to see the partitioning tool that comes with the installer reveal itself at first steps.

After creating 2 partitions, one for root and one for home, the tool actually recognized them automatically  in the "use as" section of the tooltip and that little touch immediately made me feel more confident during the install process.

Notice the ticks next to the partition selection. That's attention to detail. Well done system76 people!

The rest of the process was so fast that I wasn't sure if it was over when it was.

Sleek installation process

The small terminal icon that reveals what's running. Love it! 

After a few minutes it was done that's was painless. Truely

After the reboot I was greeted with a super smooth GNOME desktop. It's hard to describe but it felt really really smooth. The kind that makes you instantly say "this feels good".

Migrating my applications.

Before destroying my KDE, i kept a list of all applications I installed using sudo dpkg -i in this gist

Then I simply used a text editor to concat all the program names and install them in one go as such :

sudo apt install code darktable docker .....zsh

That took 5 minutes and everything was installed correctly

Pop Shop

This is their app store and it looked good enough compared to atrocities I've seen elsewhere(looking at you elementary os).

It asked me if I wanted Steam so I installed that and restored my game library in a few minutes. That worked painlessly as well.

Auto Tiling

This was the one feature that convinced me to move. I was happy to find a DE taking this seriously and putting it right inside the defaults.

Auto Tiling Pop OS 

It works as expected, but more importantly I can toggle it off whenever I want. This way I actually have best of both worlds(floating and tiling).

Auto Tiling Settings

Gaming

I noticed my games were running smoother than they were under KDE Neon. I'm not sure why because I'm using the same drivers. I'm just happy it's so much smoother. I was disconnected from a few games under KDE Neon because my desktop would refuse to render the game somehow.

Conclusion

This will now be my daily driver, gaming machine and workstation.