Trying Out System76's Pop!_OS Ubuntu-Based Operating System

There is the "app store" for easily installing more packages.

The Geary email client is one of the packages being included with Pop!_OS by default now shipped by default on upstream Ubuntu. Firefox remains the default web browser. I expect System76 to continue making more default application changes for their release to coincide with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS next year.

System76 has been promoting Pop!_OS as an operating system for makers/creators. On their webpage they also promote it for machine learning, data science, robots, aerospace, and other fields... A bit peculiar given they really haven't been modifying the base operating system so much and is desktop-focused, but we'll see what they can do for 2018. It would be great if they would e.g. take some cues from Intel's Clear Linux and apply more performance optimizations and tuning to some key software components, especially with Pop!_OS to ship by default on their future hardware if they could really deliver a more optimized and performant experience than what you would find out-of-the-box on Ubuntu.

Like Ubuntu 17.10, Pop!_OS is shipping with the Linux 4.13 kernel, GCC 7.2 compiler, GNOME Shell 3.26.1, EXT4 by default, and Mesa 17.2.2 as some key packages worth mentioning.

It will be interesting to see what comes of Pop!_OS in 2018: it has potential due to the prominence of System76, but I do hate the "Pop!_OS" name.

Pop!_OS can be downloaded from System76.com.