That’s a lot of improvements and bug fixes. Some great features too. However, I strongly dislike bland Open Sans. Yuck! What the fuck are they thinking making their unique OEM desktop font look like everything everywhere and blending into the Gooble-verse. OPens Sans is used on something like 20 million web sites, numerous apps and Android phones. Google owns it. I understand the technical reasons why they might try to use it, but it’s not a good fit for System76. FiraGO or DejaVu Sans would be a better company fit. I imagine there’s a good portion of their target market who don’t appreciate Google’s abusive and intrusive behavior and attempt to de-Google. Their company aesthetic, adherence to open source philosophy and attempt to buck the abusive corporate tech surveillance right down to the firmware is at odds with using this bland overused corporate owned font. System76 strip out all of the telemetry, closed source additions and account options Canonical add to Ubuntu. They have a reputation for respecting their customer’s privacy and Google is the polar opposite. I hope that decision doesn’t bite them in the ass.
I’m saying what the fuck, but in the end it’s just a font and can be changed, and I will be changing it. COSMIC is absolutely awesome otherwise. I know there’s a lot of unavoidable corporate contributions to Linux, but this one is totally unavoidable. IIt’s a choice and decisi And, I know Open Sans is open source, but I don’t get this at all. FiraGO would make more sense. It’s an improved Fira Sans with international glyphs.
I am used to and love a keyboard driven set up, so Pop’s native auto tiling is a comfortable fit. Originally based on i3WM it was a perfect swap and I’ve not looked back all these years.
Many things people will say about Pop are related to aesthetics, but Pop’s real power and reason to use lay deep in the system. Pop has the reliability of Debian and the utilities of Ubuntu, but Pop’s devs strip out anything from upstream that is not in the average user interests, or not in alignment with open source principles. They often rewrite entire system components in a memory safe code language called Rust. So the things they remove make it more user friendly and less creepy corporate crap. Telemetry, Snaps backend and Ubuntu Pro are three examples that come to mind.
Pop’s devs are constantly investigating ways to optimize and tweak the system for better performance. Many of these tweaks and System76 software have been accepted upstream being high quality code and improving things significantly.
Pop is NOT Ubuntu or some reskin or basic fork of it. Ubuntu ISO is now a whopping 6GB+ where Pop is under 3GB. So much bloat is removed. And one of Pop’s most important features is the fact it is created as an OEM operating system for hardware sales. System76 NEED a stable working OS at all times and Pop’s devs are on the ball. They have consistently demonstrated that they are able to keep security at a maximum while maintaining usability.