It’s quite a long way from ready – but it’s clearly visible in the distance
The latest version of System76’s Ubuntu remix is available, but it’s not finished by any means. The new Rust-based desktop is somewhat usable, though.
US shifter of Linux boxes System76 has released alpha 1 of Pop!_OS 24.04. It’s the company’s remix of Ubuntu Noble Numbat, with its own in-house ground-up desktop environment, codenamed COSMIC and implemented in Rust. The result is a new and incomplete desktop, running on top of a fairly stable and mature OS. Some parts are still missing and we saw some occasional but repeatable app crashes, but it’s usable if you’re patient. It has already received some rave reviews, but we think it will sharply polarize users.
Pop OS is a relatively new distro: the first release appeared in late 2017, and the Reg FOSS desk has looked at it a couple of times: first at version 21.10, which caused us significant problems, and later at the next LTS release, version 22.04 which proved less troublesome. As an Ubuntu remix, it makes some interesting but not all that profound changes under the covers. What’s interesting about this release in particular is its new desktop environment, COSMIC. This has been a long time coming – the Register covered the plans way back in 2021. A few years later, we have a preliminary version to try out.
First, let’s look at the OS part. There aren’t too many radical changes here: it is based on the most recent Ubuntu LTS, and while its development team is busily building a new desktop, the distro stopped doing interim releases: this is the first version since 22.04. System76 removes Canonical’s Snap packaging format, and replaces it with Flatpak. On UEFI machines, Pop OS replaces the GRUB bootloader, used by Ubuntu, Debian, and most other distros, with the systemd-boot bootloader. This keeps the Linux kernel and initrd in the UEFI system partition (or ESP for short), which is unusual but forms an initial step in the direction of systemd supremo Lennart „Agent P“ Poettering’s plans for Unified Kernel Images. This means you need a much bigger ESP than standard, but that won’t be a problem on a clean install. We tested in VirtualBox, and Pop!_OS 24.04 created a whopping 1GB ESP. It also drops LibreOffice and a few other familiar apps, but you get Vim pre-installed, a tool for creating bootable USB keys, and a few other extras.
Pop OS does make some slightly unusual configuration choices under the hood. The setup program defaults to enabling full-disk encryption, using the same password as the user account, but you can untick the option. Even so, we got a dedicated swap partition, also encrypted with cryptsetup, as well as compressed swap in RAM using the zram memory-compression tool. This seems overly paranoid to us: if the user disables disk encryption, we’d prefer to see a plain old swap partition with zswap compression enabled, which we’ve found gives useful performance improvements on heavily-loaded desktops. We disabled both ZRAM and cryptsetup, but this left annoying messages during bootup about the latter.
