Hey folks.

Many moons ago when Lemmy was just getting started, I saw this community and started learning about Pop! OS. It seemed to offer a very strong set of positives:

  • Major vendor support (System 76)
  • Robust integration of Nvidia video drivers
  • Gaming-friendly

Somewhat neutrally, it’s based on Ubuntu, which seems to be almost univerally the most popular distribution to customize. There’s a lot of software available through the Pop! OS shop, and through Ubuntu and various .deb packages, so that’s probably a net positive.

I installed on my HP Omen (10th gen i7 and Nvidia 2060), and struggled almost from moment one, and it was all about video support. Supposedly, I had the System 76-packaged Nvidia driver for Pop! OS, but the Nvidia video was often not detected, even by games/tools that claimed to support it (various Ubuntu & Debian utilities dedicated to reading video specifics kept telling me I had no Nvidia card).

I downgraded the Nvidia drivers, it seemed to fix a lot of problems, except now I was running the 400-series drivers instead of the 500-series.

With both drivers, any kind of power saving mode – video off, sleep – would COMPLETELY crash the Nvidia video card. I mean, it required a cold shut down to bring it back; it stayed dead through both logout and OS restart. I eventually turned off the power save modes.

Lots of Googling suggested that Pop and the Nvidia drivers had issues with various specific power saving modes, but I had no idea what those modes were or how to tell the OS to stop using them.

I struggled along for about a year. Games were hit or miss. Old games like Armagetron froze the system solid more often than I’d like to admit. Steam Linux games seemed to work mostly OK, when the Nvidia card was behaving.

I was making USB sticks of various Linux distributions for a friend recently (Ubuntu main, Mint, Pop! OS) and got to thinking how much I used to like Mint. So I backed up my home directory and decided to wipe my machine and start over.

And folks… that was all she wrote. Mint pops a beautiful little video menu in the task bar that lets me select Intel graphics, Nvidia graphics, or dynamic switching. The Nvidia settings app was pre-installed and it actually works, not just sometimes. And my machine can wink the screen off or go into sleep mode without completely wedging the Nvidia card, and killing the external video.

I can’t really explain why Pop! OS had so many problems for me. I’m sure System 76 regressions tests against their own hardware, and I’m sure they have it working right. But, not for my HP OMEN.

  • atmur@lemmy.worldEnglish
    121·
    2 days ago

    Pop_OS has fallen behind on updates over the past couple years with their development team focused on their Cosmic DE. I’m sure it’ll catch up later, but Pop definitely isn’t in a state I could recommend to anyone right now.

    Mint is a very solid choice, but just to throw another idea out there if you’re interested in out of the box Nvidia drivers, I’ve heard good things about Nobara. You can kind of think of it being to Fedora what Pop_OS was to Ubuntu. A solid base with some of the more finicky packages preinstalled.