 Tommy here from Lawrence Systems and my favorite Linux distribution, PopOS, has released version 20.04. We're going to talk about some of the features and why I still like PopOS. But first, if you'd like to learn more about me and my company, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. If you'd like to hire short project, there's a hires button right at the top. If you want to support this channel in other ways, there's affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services we talk about on this channel, including a link to our Patreon if you'd like to become a Patreon supporter. We also have a swag store where you can get shirts and other items that are for sale and that changes from time to time what's available and what's not. So go ahead and check that out frequently. And finally, our forums. If you'd like to have a more in-depth discussion about this video, suggestions for new videos or just reach out, say hi and talk tech, our forums are a great place for that. All right, now back to the content. So this is my Lenovo L480 ThinkPad running PopOS 20, just upgraded the other day to this when it got released and it's running an Intel i5-8250U processor with the Intel UHD graphics. I bring it up because it runs really smooth and I like at least to mention which hardware I'm running this on. And I haven't had any problems with previous versions of PopOS on this and of course the latest. Matter of fact, this laptop when I first started running PopOS on it, there was one minor change you had to make with the touchpad that isn't relevant anymore. With 1910, they fixed it and of course in 20, it's worked really well. I'll also give mention to this. This is actually a neat feature. We're going to go to the about. So we'll pull up the about information on the system here and you see that I'm running the latest system here. But we're going to go over here and we'll go to firmware. This was a feature that I was unexpected. I know that you're supporting firmware updates, but it had no problem updating firmware on my Lenovo system from System76 PopOS. So I found that kind of interesting that the firmware updates. I expected it to work with, of course, if you owned and bought System76, who's an integrator who sells things like laptops, desktops that are really amazing, but they also are updating firmware on other people's devices with their firmware updater. So there was a new version of this particular system and it loaded it. So I thought that was just really slick. It did that actually in 1910, but that continues on in the version 20. Now, why do I use PopOS and not at a bunch of derivatives? The answer is they polished it up a lot and they add a lot of little enhancements over to the Nome Shell system that makes it a little bit nicer. They've also got a massive amount of keyboard shortcuts that are all well documented. And once you kind of commit these to muscle memory, yeah, it's no going back. I feel lost using systems where all my keyboard shortcuts don't work because this makes flow when you have a lot of windows open really, really nice. Now, one thing they've done is Alt-Tab is if you're familiar with the Windows world or, you know, Linux distributions, Alt-Tab has always been the go to. The new feature they've added though is this and it is super key slash. Now, the first weird part, when I hit it, mouse quit working. I can't click on anything. I'm clicking away and nothing happens. That was a little bit confusing because you think something went wrong. It didn't. It's actually a feature, not a bug. And I understand why completely. So if I wanted to launch something new and we're going to go ahead and launch the Wireshark, I launched it. So now I go back to super key here, being able just to quickly up down arrow to the things that are open. But what if something's not open? Let's open a calculator real quick. All right. Now we got that one open. Now what about if we go here and have more than one window open and we open up Google in this one. So we hit this again. Now we can see both browsers open and I can switch which one. What if I wanted to have 20 browsers open? I can't remember which one of those browsers had which thing on there. Well, then you can type in Google and it starts looking for more things to launch noted by the little gear icons or what is launched as a window right here. So starting to use this just since yesterday, I've got the hang of it really quick. And I kind of like that it doesn't use the mouse. So I can't accidentally click off of the mouse. I purposely hit these two keys together or not like your accidental keystroke. But that is actually a really nice feature that they built in right there. Now Alt Tab still works and it still groups them together the same way so I can Alt Tab between them. But this especially when you have a handful of things open gets a little bit more not as nice as that little keyboard shortcut that you have there. Now OMG Ubuntu did a nice job of breaking down a lot of the other features. But one of the screenshots they had and I didn't feel like installing Blender to show this but I thought this was novel. They have the ability to launch a dedicated graphics card as an example. So if some of the apps have a special context menu and have that ability such as this right here. That's kind of a nice feature being able to just right click and context menu launch instead of opening it and telling it what to do. You can right from the get go launch it and have something dedicated if the application running has a particular feature like that. Now they also cover the pop shop. I did a really nice job on the pop shop so we're going to close this here. And the pop shop is also one of the reasons I recommend this to a lot of new people starting out in Linux because especially when it comes to games. I know this is a big hang up for people going but my games my games the pop shop and we can go and they have a decent amount of games in here. Lots of ones to play with that are open source and free but they do offer some of the proprietary things in here such as steam. Now one thing is I don't not going to bother installing steam on this particular laptop. But one problem you may run into is if you look up how do you set up steam on like Ubuntu. You'll find this is how you set it up and this is how you make it work. And what I mean by that is sometimes there's always extras and tweaks and little things. They took care of all that for you. Papa West will install steam one click install just like it shows here a way you go it's installed and it works. That's really nice. Now the other thing that is interesting that they did a nice job on here and I was excited and tested this right away with Caden live. I've always had a problem running Caden live and I run it as a flat pack. Why do I run it as a flat pack? So if you download a flat pack what that means is it's a way of encapsulating all the different dependencies an application has into a single flat pack or snap. There's a couple different competing packaging technologies which by the way you can actually run more than one on Linux. You can run snap app image flat pack whichever makes you happy but they went with flat pack and they're pulled from what's called the flat hub. Basically it's taking all the dependencies and putting them in a single file. The downside the file is kind of big it's got all the dependencies in it. So if it needs certain libraries like MLT libraries and a bunch of other little dependencies they just wrap them all into one file and keep them up to date. With Caden live that matters a lot because the dependencies are on so many different codecs and different libraries and making sure the versions match and this can be a little bit of a headache. So if you run it as a installed program relying on the other dependencies it may be a little bit out of date for compatibility reasons. When you get it from flat pack it's the absolute latest version and works. So it gives you the choice and tells you which ones installed. And I believe I didn't try this it probably let me install both which is kind of interesting as well that both yeah it does this kind of option to install. But I like that they've included this in here for applications that are packaged that way and makes it really easy to do. Now for also on the gaming side they've got all the other things like Lutris and ability better proton support etc. So if you're into gaming at all which I don't really game it much on. Well I don't game it all on this laptop is my business one. But it is nice that they have those features. So the pop shop really nice great job they did on that. Now window tiling is one of their bragging features. I'm I'm not sold on it will just say that I played with it. I think it's neat. I think in concept being able to quickly tile all the windows is awesome and it does a neat job of it. And we can do things like super key enter and then we can start resizing these to different sizes. But I say but because let's launch another terminal window here so open up a new window. And I like the way it's grouping together and I close but will open up calculator. And I'll calculate there's kind of cool that it did this but if it doesn't know where to put it it'll sometimes drag it to be unusually wide. And I don't know it's kind of weird. Now you can just double click any application to make it full screen again and we'll go back over here. The problem is when we go back in to an unfold screen when I can go here. I I don't know I'm a little I'm not completely sold as best I can describe. I think the concept is there. It's not on by default. So it's something that you can play with and turn on. It has some customization. It shows active hint to show you which windows are active. It's got a lot of keyboard shortcuts that allow you to completely manipulate things and adjust them via the keyboard which I think is kind of neat. So I'm actually moving this via keyboard and resizing the windows neat that it does that. And there may be some handy tools for doing it. But I guess that I'm not 100% sold on it where I think if anyone from systems and six is listening where this would be a really cool feature is generally I have my triple monitor set up on my desktop. And if I could turn it on on a per desktop basis, I didn't see an option for that on my other system. That would be kind of handy to be able to do. So it's a neat feature. I'm not disappointed in it. I think it's really cool concept wise. But when some applications don't behave well like this one, it's a problem. Also, some of my applications I use every day like signal and key base for communication. The tiling makes them overlap each other. I think one or one or the other either tiling is not understanding where their boundaries are or they're not properly sharing their boundaries with known to understand it. So I did find some applications seem to have some compatibility issues with it, but that's kind of be expected because it's a new feature. Now, one of the things I've always loved about PopOS is their ability to manage their virtual desktops. It just works so smooth, so well being able to move these. And of course they got a lot of keyboard shortcuts to be able to adjust things like this. And this version is no exception. So being able to group everything back together on one screen like this and drag them all around and say, all right, this goes here and this goes here. That's just been great. Now under the hood, they've updated the kernel. They've updated GNOME to the latest version. That's all really nice. WireGuard is now easily installed and going to be back ported. This is coming from Ubuntu, but there's no, to my knowledge, I haven't seen this, no type of WireGuard VPN menus that are available. WireGuard is still, although it's getting closer to being more popular, it's going to be a while before we see it integrated into a lot of different things. It's a cool firewall, sorry, it's a cool VPN system, WireGuard. I see the merits of it, but it takes a long time for a lot of places to jump on top of it. It really needs to go through a solid code review and everything else and code review and integration with a lot of different products. But that is something I will mention I'm aware of. Speaking of VPNs though, it carried over all my settings. OpenVPN is my go-to for POPOS for connecting. I have PIA in here. I have my home, I can VPN into my office or my office as a split tunnel. So it, this carried over the VPN, no problem connected perfectly fine. So if I wanted to go back to my house and it menus work perfectly fine. So I didn't have any issues there. Wi-Fi work perfectly fine. The only thing minor gripe here is like the suspend. If you wanted to hit it, it used to be just a button down there. Now it's, you got to like expand it out. If that's all I have to complain about, that's really not much. But overall, it's really stable. I really liked what they've done with POPOS. It's still like I said, my go-to daily driver. I use it on my desktop, use it on my laptop. Some people have asked me about some of the other distributions like specialized ones that are for security. I usually run those like in a virtual system. Because none of them I have found really stable enough to be my daily driver. Kaden Live works really well on the flat pack install. I've already tried and did some editing and this video is edited using POPOS version 20 of Kaden Live using on there. So I haven't had any stability issues. Granted, I know I've only had it for a day or two. But I played with it in beta. It seemed stable. And system 26 track record for making things solid has been there. So it gives my thumbs up. Definitely upgrade to it. Unless you're not a Linux user and you hate Linux, then don't. But for the most part, if you want to get started with Linux, I will be doing a new video soon on getting started with this. Because it has disc encryption out of the box. There's a lot to all the features it has. I kind of want to walk people through to bring more people over. Because I know a lot of people are not as excited when a new version of Windows comes out. Because, well, I'm not going to pick on them. But they've had every time there's a major version update of Windows, it's been kind of a mess. And welcome if you want to come on over to the Linux world where it works really smooth and updates are exciting, not cringing. Come on over. It's great. It's not that hard to switch over. And a lot of your games do work if you're a gamer. I can't guarantee all of them work, but I will say a lot of them do work. But from a business productivity standpoint, especially if you're a developer or a coder, this is the environment that I really love. This does really well for both DevOps, everything else. And I know a lot of developers that have moved over to this world. And welcome. It's a great place to be. Thanks. 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