I ran Debian (testing) for years, and loved it. I have always admired Debian and still respect their philosophy. (Even though this philosophy makes things trickier than needed for end-users.)
Having said that, I grew tired of maintaining it & updating packages all the time. Now I was admittedly running 'testing', which is strongly discouraged, but if you want recent packages (which I did, especially for my DE), it's either that or 'unstable' (yes, I know about backports for 'stable' but that's a whole other can of worms.)
But I digress - as someone who ran Debian for years, and still admires it, I have to say that Pop!_OS is truly linux done right.
System76 (the developers) have done an excellent job - it's absolutely gorgeous, from the installer to the thoughtfully tweaked & themed DE and the SUPERlative keyboard shortcuts (sensibly built around the 'super' key.)
It also has excellent support for Nvidia graphics and easy switching between Nvidia & integrated graphics, a major pain point for most distros.
Some dismiss it as a 'skinned Ubuntu', but that is a disservice to the excellent work System76 have done:
I cannot extol the virtues of this distro enough - look up some reviews, check it out on reddit (/r/pop_os/), or better yet, just try out the live demo.
PS I was a die-hard XFCE user, but System76 made me love Gnome. Mind you, I did have to install Gnome shell tweaks and a few (just a few, I don't like bloat) extensions to get around some of the Gnome foundation's annoyances.
Pop!_OS
Don't let the unusual name put you off. ;)
I ran Debian (testing) for years, and loved it. I have always admired Debian and still respect their philosophy. (Even though this philosophy makes things trickier than needed for end-users.)
Having said that, I grew tired of maintaining it & updating packages all the time. Now I was admittedly running 'testing', which is strongly discouraged, but if you want recent packages (which I did, especially for my DE), it's either that or 'unstable' (yes, I know about backports for 'stable' but that's a whole other can of worms.)
But I digress - as someone who ran Debian for years, and still admires it, I have to say that Pop!_OS is truly linux done right.
System76 (the developers) have done an excellent job - it's absolutely gorgeous, from the installer to the thoughtfully tweaked & themed DE and the SUPERlative keyboard shortcuts (sensibly built around the 'super' key.)
It also has excellent support for Nvidia graphics and easy switching between Nvidia & integrated graphics, a major pain point for most distros.
Some dismiss it as a 'skinned Ubuntu', but that is a disservice to the excellent work System76 have done:
pop.system76.com/docs/difference-b...
I cannot extol the virtues of this distro enough - look up some reviews, check it out on reddit (/r/pop_os/), or better yet, just try out the live demo.
PS I was a die-hard XFCE user, but System76 made me love Gnome. Mind you, I did have to install Gnome shell tweaks and a few (just a few, I don't like bloat) extensions to get around some of the Gnome foundation's annoyances.
Definitely a surprising amount of votes for this one. Will absolutely take a serious test run.