 What is the best Linux desktop distribution? Well, when you ask people this, you get a wide variety of answers because opinions, of course, will vary. Some of the usual suspects you'll hear include things like Ubuntu and the various Ubuntu flavors, Linux Mint, elementary OS, Manjaro, MX Linux, things like that. But here in the last few months, especially, I've been hearing from more and more of you guys that you're running PopOS and that you are blown away by it. You think it's fantastic. You think it's the best Linux distribution on the planet. And I haven't really tried PopOS lately. I've tried some of their earlier versions and they were good. I won't say that I was just blown away by them, but I thought it was a fine Linux distribution. But yesterday they had a big release PopOS 2104 with their new customized GNOME desktop environment that they call the cosmic desktop environment. And I've been playing around with this thing a little bit and I got to say I'm blown away by it. I really think that this new cosmic desktop environment that now ships with PopOS is really going to make PopOS potentially explode in popularity. So this is a virtual machine of PopOS that I just quickly spun up. And let's run through a quick installation. So when the installer comes up, of course you have language. It's selected English for me by default, which is correct. So I'm just going to click select United States for the region. It's already selected for me. I'm just going to click select English US for the keyboard layout. That's correct for me. So I'm just going to click select. And then what kind of English US keyboard layout is it? You know, a standard layout, the default layout, or we're using a Dvorak or Colmak. I'm just using a standard English US keyboard. So I'm just going to click select. And then we come to the partitioning. Do we want to erase the entire disk and give the whole disk to PopOS, which is the clean install? Or do we want to do custom advance, which is create the partitions ourselves? And, you know, you may have to do this, especially if you're dual booting with another operating system for this virtual machine, though, I'm just going to give the entire virtual hard drive in this virtual machine to PopOS. I'm going to click clean install. And then what disk do we want to install to? There's only one disk in this VM. Those of you doing this on physical hardware, if you have multiple drives in a computer, you may have to select the exact drive that you want to actually install PopOS to. I'm going to click erase and install. It's going to ask for a name, our full name, and our computer user name. So I'm just going to do DT for my username. Then we need to create a strong and complicated password for our user. And then confirm the strong and complicated password. Click next. And then do we want to encrypt the drive? I typically don't encrypt on my machines because I'm really the only person that has access to these machines, but especially laptops because they are susceptible to being stolen. You know, somebody can actually steal your laptop and potentially get sensitive information off a hard drive. It's best to actually encrypt your drive. So I'm going to do encryption and I'm going to do the encryption password is the same as the user account password. Then I'm going to click encrypt and then the installation will proceed from here. The installation process is very quick. It'll probably take another five minutes or so for the installation to complete. And the installation has completed. Now all I need to do is restart the computer. And since we encrypted our hard drive, the first thing we have to do is please unlock the disk crypt data. So enter the encryption password. And then we get our login screen. Our user DT has already been selected. Just click enter or hit it with your mouse and then enter your super strong and complicated user password. And we are logged in to this rather attractive cosmic desktop environment. Now the very first thing you get when you first log into Papa OS is the welcome screen, the greeter here. And this is a little slide show basically telling you a little bit about Papa OS and how to customize it and how to get some of the settings correct, especially if you maybe mistyped something in the installer, for example. For example, maybe we didn't actually set our keyboard layout correctly. You know, we could change some of that here. Everything's correct for me, but we could also decide whether we want a dock. I could click no dock. I could also click dock extends to the edges. That is the default. Maybe I want the dock not to extend to the edge, which honestly with a centered dock, I probably wouldn't want it to extend to the edge. So I'm just going to leave that for now and then configure the top bar. Do we want to show the workspace button? I mean, that's kind of cool. I'm not sure if I really need that. If there was a hot key to show workspaces, I probably wouldn't need that. I'd probably take that off the applications button. I definitely don't need because the cosmic desktop environment, when you hit super, the cosmic desktop environment has its own run launcher, very similar to something like Dmenu or Rofi. And it's a very powerful command launcher. Because of that, I'm probably never going to use the applications menu. I'm just going to do everything through that run launcher. So I'm actually going to turn off the applications button. I don't need to see that ever again. And then this slide tells you a little bit about the run launcher, which is when you hit the super key, you get the run launcher that comes up. This next slide goes over some of the finger gestures for your touch pads for those of you that are installing Papa OS on a laptop. And then the next screen is about privacy. Do we want to allow applications to determine your geographical location? I like that that's already ticked off by default because, yeah, I don't really want anybody to be getting my IP address or my geolocation information. Now we need to set a time zone. I did notice in the installation process, we never set a time zone. So this is where we have to set that. I'm going to select the central time zone here in the U.S. I'm just going to click around until I find Chicago in the U.S. I'm not actually in Chicago, but Chicago is in the central time zone. So that's fine. I'm going to click next. We could connect some of our online accounts like Google, NextCloud, Microsoft, etc. I'm not going to do that here on camera, so I'm going to skip that. And then finally start using Papa OS setup is complete. Now I noticed since this came out yesterday, there's already some updates because in the dock I have the pop shop program, which is their software center. And you see I've got the red circle at the top right that has six on it. That's letting me know there are six updates available. So I'm just going to go ahead and review the updates. It looks like it's LibreOffice. The LibreOffice suite needs to be updated. I'm just going to click update all and the updates have completed. I'm going to click the home tab to go back to the front page of the pop shop. I will say the pop shop is a very attractive graphical software center for those of you that want to use it for me on all of my Linux systems. I'm just so comfortable using command line package managers in a terminal. I typically don't pull up these graphical applications to install and remove software. Not that there's anything wrong with them. It's just they're typically slow because, you know, they've got to pull down a lot of images. Sometimes reviews, you know, software reviews from users and things. They've got a lot of extra stuff to them that the command line typically doesn't. But of course, that's just me personal preference for those of you that want to use the pop shop. It's a fantastic program. Now, just looking at the cosmic desktop environment here in pop OS, I will say it's very clean, very polished, very professional looking. And it has almost like a Mac OS 10 kind of feel actually just looking at it. The look of it looks almost Mac like a Mac OS 10 light because you got the bottom center dock. That's very reminiscent of the Mac. It's also kind of reminiscent of the upcoming Windows 11 because Windows 11 is about to do this bottom centered task bar as well. Now I'm going to hit super to get our run launcher. And this is the pop OS run launcher here that's built into the cosmic desktop environment. I'm just going to start typing the word settings and hit enter to open the settings menu here. And you have the standard stuff here in the settings menu, for example, where you have displays where you can change the resolution. You have some networking stuff, Bluetooth stuff, the power settings and things like that. But what you really want to play with here with the cosmic desktop environment is probably desktop, because this is where you can really customize the desktop environment. And when I say customize, you don't get a ton of customization options, but you get a few, which is something you don't get in standard GNOME. For example, the super key action, do we want the super key to bring up this run launcher? 99% of you probably do want that. But if for some reason you wanted the super key to bring up the workspaces menu, this thing here, you could do that as well. Some people may want the super key to bring up the traditional applications menu rather than the run launcher. The applications menu is this thing here. Honestly, it's big and it's a little slower than the standard run launcher. Honestly, I would just go with the pop OS custom run launcher. I would not do the applications menu. You can enable the top left hot corner to trigger the workspaces. So when you throw the mouse on the top left corner, you just get the workspace menu to appear rather than having to click a button. I don't like that because too many times you get that thing triggered accidentally. So I don't typically do hot corners in any desktop environment or window manager. Now the top bar, now that's typically one people will customize. Do you need to see the workspaces? Actually, because both workspaces and applications are also in the dock and in the top panel, I would probably disable both in one. So I probably don't need to show workspaces or applications at the top because if it's going to be in the dock, they're already here, then why not? Then you have window controls. And this is interesting because now the GNOME desktop environment wanted to remove all the window controls like maximize and minimize. Well, the PopOS people with the Cosmic Desktop Environment now allow you to have a minimize and a maximize button if you so choose. Now the maximize button is nice to turn on. But remember, you can always just double click the top panel of any window to get it maximized. Double click it again to un-maximize it. And that's a lot easier than always having to move your mouse to this specific button on a window. Again, for wrist pain, you know, I don't like using window control buttons, any of them, even the close button. I would probably have hotkeys for all of this stuff. I would set a key binding to close the windows and I would probably just use your standard double click to maximize and un-maximize for minimize. You could always just click the taskbar at the bottom or you could actually set that to a key binding. Or if you wanted to, you could probably set that to a mouse binding, maybe do a middle click to minimize. Another interesting thing you can do is the time and date notifications here in the center. That's really nice, but do they need to be in the center? Especially since I removed everything over here on the far left. I mean, I could move that to the left. That makes a lot more sense. You know, it's just kind of weird that that would be centered and nothing is on the left. But you do have some stuff in the right. That's just aesthetics though. I can move it to the right as well. Kind of integrate it over here. That's kind of nice too. The only thing with this, and this is a problem with GNOME more so than the cosmic desktop environment. They're basing off of GNOME. So they're kind of limited probably in what they can do. This panel is almost useless, right? Once you have the dock and everything in the dock, this panel really serves no purpose. I mean, yes, you have your notification stuff here and your sys tray stuff here. But if you could actually just push that stuff into the dock somehow, I don't know if that's something that they may be planned to do in the future. This is just wasted space here. This panel, this useless panel is now kind of just dead space on the screen. For now, I'm just going to move the time and date and the notifications to the far left. And that's about all the customizations you can do for the desktop settings here. For backgrounds, we can change the wallpaper. There are some really nice backgrounds in this wallpaper pack. And of course, some of the cool ones are the POPOS branded wallpapers. Of course, you had the cosmic wallpaper here that would look really good with a light theme because that's a dark wallpaper. So with a light theme that would really stand out. Let's actually turn on the light theme, go to appearance and turn on light. And that actually didn't change the shell theme, but it did change the appearance of your GTK applications. So actually that didn't really do much for us. I probably will stick with the dark theme. And so instead what I'll do is I'll go find a light wallpaper. I like this abstract art that they've got going on here. That there looks really nice as well. A lot of cool abstract art wallpapers here. Yeah, I could really get down with that. And one thing I want to do is the icons here on the dock are a little too big for my taste. I'm going to hit the super key again and start typing settings and hit enter. And then what I want to do is go to dock here and the dock. I've got the dock enabled. If you didn't want to use the dock, you could disable it. I'm not sure why you would want to do that. I think most people want a task bar to show the programs that are open. You could also extend the edges to the screen, which is the default. Remember, I turned that off during the initial setup show launcher icon in the dock. So this is this here. So all that does is the same as hitting the super key. It just has a button here. That's honestly, if you're always going to use the super key anyway, I'm not sure that needs to be there. I'd probably tick that off workspaces. I may leave applications. I'm never going to use the applications menu because I'm always just going to hit super and do the run launcher. So I'd probably turn applications off. Do we want this to always be visible? I do not. I want it to IntelliHide. So intelligently hide means when I make something full screen, I want the dock to go away. So that is definitely what I would tick on. That's what I would suggest you guys tick on. And then the dock size as far as the icons and the width of the dock, we could do small, which is 36 pixels. But still, that's a little big for me because, again, it's kind of wasted space on the screen. I mean, the icons, I can tell what they are even at a very small size. So I'd probably put that down to maybe 32 pixels on my 1920 by 1080 resolution screen here. And then what I could do is I could just add stuff to the dock, stuff that I use all the time. For example, what is the movie player here? It's videos. I'm just going to go ahead and open that up. And let's not make this full screen right now. And then if I right click here and then add to favorites, then now videos is part of the dock. Of course, you could also add it with the traditional applications menu, the full screen applications menu. You could just drag the icon to the dock. But since I disabled that, because now I'm just going to use this run launcher, which we should talk about this run launcher, because there's some really cool stuff you can do with it. You can do a lot more than just launch programs. For example, if I type Google and then Distrotub, it will open Firefox. And it, of course, will get the Google search results for Distrotub. Actually, Distrotub. I forgot to add the E to it. But you get the idea. If I hit super again to get the launcher and I type the equal sign, that is letting the launcher know, hey, I'm not launching a program. What I'm doing is I'm going to do a mathematical equation. I'm going to do, I don't know, two times two. And it's going to let me know that's four. So you get a basic calculator right here. Five plus five is 10. If you want to search your recent files, you prefix that with D colon and then the name of the file. So I don't know Bash RC. Now I have never done any recent files or anything here. So nothing's going to be returned for me, because there are no recent files until I actually start doing in this VM. But D colon name of file searches for your recent files. Also, you could do T colon for a terminal command. So if I did T colon and I don't know H top, it should launch a terminal and H top in the terminal. But H top is not installed system 76. You were doing so good. I love your cosmic desktop environment and your Linux distribution. But you got to install H top out of the box. And if I did T colon VM, it'll launch a terminal and launch VM inside the terminal. VM is also not found. You're killing me. You're killing me. Papo is I'm going to find a terminal command that we can actually run. So T colon top top is always installed on every Linux distribution. So there is top. One of the things I like about the cosmic desktop environment is it's very keyboard friendly because it has this great run launcher. Right. You never are going to search through a menu for application again. You just hit super and you start typing something and you hit enter. For example, I don't know files to launch the file manager. And there's already a key binding for closing a window. I believe it is super queue. Yeah, super queue for quit. You can always change the key bindings just go in the settings manager and look for keyboard shortcuts and you could set the key bindings to anything you want. But I strongly suggest, you know, just for sake of your hands and your wrist to avoid any kind of repetitive stress injuries and you know, because using the mouse and constantly doing this waving motion with the mouse, you know, all over the screen. Get away from them. Launch all your programs with a run launcher. Kill all your programs with super queue or whatever key binding you set because honestly, closing a program is the most common command you do. And if you do it every single time with the mouse, think about all the hundreds of thousands of times you've closed programs in your life and had to go and, you know, click on that mouse. That's killing your wrist. Do that with a key binding. Overall, I'm loving the cosmic desktop environment. I do love that there are some customization options to it. And honestly, it's pretty good out of the box because really, this is what GNOME 3 should have been all along. Like nobody should have had to go fix GNOME, but that's kind of what the PopOS guys are doing. They're basically saying, hey, GNOME, you've made all the wrong decisions. Let's put it right. One of the cool things you can do for those of you that love the old Unity desktop environment, which had the dock on the left-hand side, you can go into the dock settings and instead of bottom of the screen, you can put that on the left here if you wanted to or you could put it on the right. The right side of the screen doesn't make much sense for most people, but I think the left makes a lot of sense just for, again, just mouse travel. You know, you travel less having a dock on the left-hand side of the screen than the bottom because your mouse is typically nowhere near the bottom of the screen most of the time. It's very weird having to travel to the bottom of the screen to do things because everything happens and typically the top left of the screen. Think about your browser button controls, right, the forward and backwards and the home button. They're all the top left, right? So everything typically happens in this area of the screen so it doesn't make sense to always be doing stuff right here and then any time you want to do something in the dock, you have to travel all the way to the bottom, right? You know, typically you want to try to avoid having to do anything on the far right-hand side of the screen and the bottom because everything should be geared toward the top left especially or in this case the centered left is not too far from the top left. This would work. I'm going to put this back to the bottom, the default settings, but for those of you that are interested in a left-hand dock, you do have that option available. Now for those of you that were already running PopOS, you're running the previous version of PopOS 2010. 2010 will reach end of life in a few weeks. So if you're on PopOS 2010, you need to upgrade to 2104 and it's very easy to upgrade. All you need to do, let me go ahead and do this quickly. I'm going to type super and then start typing terminal to open a terminal and then I'm going to make the terminal full screen here and I'm going to zoom in so you can see the commands. What you need to do is you need to do a sudo apt update to update the repositories and in sudo apt full dash upgrade. Run that command and that should upgrade you from 2010 to 2104. Now one thing I didn't cover, we didn't go through all the programs that were installed on PopOS. PopOS doesn't have a ton of stuff installed. It's got just a bare bones, kind of basic suite of applications that you would expect. It has the browser Firefox which we showed. It has Geary for an email client. It has the full LibreOffice suite. It has a movie player. Beyond that, it has some of the standard GNOME utilities like the text editor and the archive manager and a terminal. But beyond that, it doesn't have a lot of stuff installed. For example, GIMP and Inkscape and a lot of the multimedia programs are not here. There's no dedicated audio player. There's no rhythm box or anything. Probably if you want to play audio until you get something else installed, you could just play audio in the movie player itself because the movie player can do both audio and video. And I kind of like that. I kind of like that they didn't install everything in the kitchen sink, right? They're leaving it to you to go install the programs that suit your needs. They just give you enough stuff. You can get work done right away in PopOS, but you probably are going to have to install some of your favorite applications. Overall, my first impressions of PopOS 2104 and the new cosmic desktop environment is it's fantastic. This is easily the best GNOME desktop distribution on the planet right now. I don't care. You can talk to me about Ubuntu and Fedora and all the other stuff. This is the best GNOME desktop environment and I'm not a big fan of GNOME. I could use this. I could actually put PopOS 2104 on my laptops and I would be happy. Now, before I go, I need to think a few special people. I need to think the producers of the show. Apsi Gabe James Mitchell-Wess, Akami Allen Chuck-Kurt, David, Dylan, Gregory, Erion, Alexander, Paul, Polytech Scott, Stevens, Vin, Willie, these guys. They're my high-steered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick first look at the recently released PopOS 2104, it wouldn't have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen as well. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to support me, please consider subscribing to DistroTube over on Patreon. Alright guys, peace. It only took about a decade for somebody to make GNOME usable.