 This is going to be a busy time of year because Ubuntu just released their latest long-term support release and because there's so many Linux distributions that base off the Ubuntu LTS, we're going to see a slew of distribution releases in the next couple of months. And one of the first ones to come out of the gate is PapaOS 2204. They just announced that particular release and today I'm going to take a look at the new release of PapaOS. I'm going to give it a spin inside a virtual machine. PapaOS kind of fascinates me as a Linux distribution because when System76, the makers of PapaOS, announced that they were creating their own Linux distribution and Ubuntu-based Linux distribution using the GNOME desktop environment essentially, I thought, what's the point? Because you already got Ubuntu, right? I mean, we've already got Ubuntu with the GNOME desktop environment. So why make an Ubuntu-based distribution using GNOME? It seemed kind of strange to me. But now that PapaOS is starting to become a much more mature product, I see a lot of the changes they've made. This really isn't just another Ubuntu spin at this point. And what they're doing with the GNOME desktop environment, I think they make probably the best GTK-based desktop environment out there right now. The other big selling point for PapaOS is just enabling all your hardware drivers and things like that, you would expect that would be a big focus of PapaOS being that the makers of System76, you know, a company that sells Linux, desktops, laptops, servers. So let me switch over to my desktop and let's run through a quick installation of PapaOS 2204 inside a virtual machine. I gave this VM, 6 gigs of RAM, and I gave it two threads of my 24 thread CPU, plenty of resources for this particular operating system. Now, when you first boot into the live environment here in PapaOS, you're greeted with the installer and immediately, of course, it's going to ask you for language and English is the default and that is fine for me. So I'll just click select. And then what version of English? I want US English, of course, and keep moving on the keyboard layout. I want English US and that is selected. So I'll just keep on and then more keyboard layout. I want the default. I don't want any weird stuff like Dvorak or Colmack or anything like that. And then what do we want to do with our partitioning? Do we want to do a clean install, meaning erase the entire hard drive and then give PapaOS 2204 the entire drive? That's what I'm going to do. But if I wanted to, I could click custom advanced and this way I could do some manual partitioning and that's important, especially if you're going to dual boot alongside another operating system. But for me, clean install is correct. So I'll choose that. Then it's going to ask what drive to install to now in this virtual machine, I only have one virtual hard drive and let me click on that and then click erase and install. And then it's asking for our name. Now I could give it my full name. I'm just going to call myself DT. The username for this computer will also just be DT and I'm going to click next. Now let's create a strong and complicated password for the DT user and then confirm the strong and complicated password and then click next. Now do we want to encrypt our drive? Encrypting this drive protects data from being read yada yada yada. You guys know, you know, that's that's good, especially if your laptop, for example, is ever stolen, they would need your encryption password to ever access any data on the drive. So that's a good idea to encrypt your devices. It's ticked on by default. So I'm going to go with the default. I'm going to choose encrypt. By the way, your encryption password, you notice I didn't have to set an encryption password. By default, the encryption password is going to be the same password as your user accounts password. And then we get to the screen here. It says it's partitioning drives. It's extracting the files. I'm assuming it's installing everything at this point. I'm going to pause the recording here for a couple of minutes and I'll be back once this portion of the installation has completed. And that portion of the installation took about five minutes or so. And now we have the option to restart the device, reboot the machine. That's what I'm going to do right now. All right. And now it's asking for our encryption password. Otherwise, we can't access any data on our drive, right? So let's enter the encryption password. And now we're at the login manager. And let me go ahead and click on my username DT and enter DT's password. And we are logged into our desktop environment. I'm going to hit the super key to bring up our run launcher. I'm going to search for displays. Let me go ahead and get a proper 1920 by 1080 screen resolution here. Click apply. Keep changes. And then I can close out that. All right. And now of course, when you first log in, you get a little welcome screen here on the very first screen. Of course, they ask you about the dock. Do you want a dock that resembles a panel, meaning it's full screen at the bottom? Or would you rather have the dock not be extend the entire width of the screen? So it looks more like a dock for me. I probably would go with no dock if this was my own machine because it really serves no purpose to have the dock there when I can just hit super and start typing for the program I want to launch. Not to mention you can set up key bindings for programs you launch all the time. But most people are probably going to want a dock or a panel here at the bottom. I'm going to leave it as the default setting and I'm going to click next. And the next screen show workspaces button. So here we have workspaces. If I click on it, all our workspaces are listed in a vertical format, which is the old school GNOME format because in modern versions of GNOME, GNOME 42 right now, the workspaces typically are displayed horizontally in a list rather than a vertical stack like this. It really doesn't matter to me personally. I could take it or leave it either way. But do I need to have this workspaces button here? I probably don't. I probably turn that off. Do I want the applications button, which gives us the application launcher, which is a different kind of launcher than just hitting the super key. This is more of a proper run launcher where you just have a prompt and you start typing where the application launcher, you could do the same. It's got a little input field that you could type and launch something immediately, but it also lists applications more like in a proper start menu, if you will. I'm going to leave the applications button here. Now date and time. Do I want to leave that here in the center? That's kind of odd, to be honest. I probably would want that to the right over here. Why is that in the center of the screen? I've never understood that that's a decision that the GNOME team has made. I could put it all the way to the left, which is kind of odd. I think most people just assume the time and date probably needs to be on the far right of a panel. I'm going to leave it in the center for now just because that's the default. Then I'm going to click next. We've got the gestures for those of you using this on a laptop. I am not. Then we've got the option to switch to a light theme because the dark theme is turned on by default. You notice when you switch to the light theme, it changes wallpapers because in the newer versions of GNOME, and this was the same in the latest Ubuntu 22.04 when you switch between light mode and dark mode, light mode and dark mode can have different wallpapers set to them. When I switch back to dark mode, I get a different wallpaper. That's a really nice touch. Then we want to turn on geolocation. This is for privacy. Do you want to actually give certain applications your geolocation information? I don't. I would leave that ticked off and then I'm going to click next. Now let's ask for time zone because we didn't actually do this during the installation process, but I am in the central time zone here in the US. I'm going to pick Chicago here in the US, which is in the central time zone. Then I'm going to click next, and then do we want to connect to any online accounts? I don't want to do that. Not here on camera in this VM, so I'm going to skip that. Then it says all done. Start using POPOS. Click that button. One thing I can say about POPOS as far as a GNOME desktop is it's probably the best GNOME desktop out there because they take GNOME and they actually make it into something that people can use, something that looks normal out of the box. I hate to be negative about the GNOME desktop, but vanilla GNOME is kind of bad. And Ubuntu's version of GNOME, they do a lot to make GNOME rather usable. I don't mind mainline Ubuntu's version of the GNOME desktop with the bar on the left and all of that, but I do think that the cosmic version of GNOME here, which is what POPOS is calling their cosmic desktop environment, this isn't actually what's going to be the cosmic desktop environment. This is still GNOME. They've got some cosmic UI elements baked into this thing to make it look like this, but eventually what the POPOS team is going to do is they're working on their own desktop environment called the cosmic desktop environment. They're basically, it'll be a GTK based desktop environment that they have written entirely in Rust. And it's not ready yet, but when it is, I'm going to be definitely taking a look at that. But for now, what they've done with GNOME, I find this is rather pleasing. We have the show launcher here. So you've got an icon for the run launcher, but honestly, you don't really need that icon because you could just hit the super key. The applications button, by the way, up here at the top, we could do super A to get the applications launcher escape to get out of it. I really like the story night wallpaper with the POP logo on that. That's really nice. Also in the dock, we have show workspaces. So again, we didn't need the workspaces button at the top. And we've got show workspaces down here at the dock. I probably would keep one or the other, probably not both. Right now, I'll just leave that in the dock show applications. Well, I have applications here. So really, I probably should just remove applications from here, just put everything in the dock. Honestly, the POP team, what they could probably do is just consolidate all of this into one panel. Because honestly, there's hardly anything in this top panel. Really, I mean, you've got the time and date and you got a sys tray over here. You know, if you could put that down here, you know, and just consolidate everything into one panel, because it would save on screen real estate that having two panels really doesn't make any sense because there's not enough going on in either panel to justify having two on the screen. Firefox is the default browser here in POPOS 2204. Let's see what version of Firefox we are on. If I go to help and about Firefox, this is Firefox 99.0.1 64 bit version. Let's close out of that. And for those of you wondering, is that Firefox a snap? Because obviously in Ubuntu 2204, Firefox is only available as a snap. If I do a snap list, you see snap is not even installed in POPOS. They don't use the snap D Damon. There are no snaps installed. And while I'm here, if I do a username dash or let's get the kernel version, we are actually on a slightly newer kernel version also within in Ubuntu 2204. Because Ubuntu was using still one of the five 15 series. But here inside POPOS, they're on 5.16.19. So that is rather interesting. Let's get a count of the installed program. So if I do a apt list dash, dash installed. Of course, I didn't do dash, dash. I did a single dash. So let's do dash, dash installed. And of course, that spits out all the programs that are installed with the apt package manager line by line. So let's get a line count by piping that into WC, the word count program space dash L for line count. 1733 packages installed using the apt package manager. Now the apt package manager is not the only way to get applications installed here inside POP. Because let's open up the pop shop. And you see, I've got one here, I've got a notification here that's letting me know there is an update available. So you could take an update here. This was just released, I believe yesterday and already there are some updates available. I'm going to skip taking the updates right now. But what I want to show you guys is if I go into the settings here inside the pop shop, the tabs at the top here, we have various things such as, you know, updates, you want to do the important security updates, the recommended updates, you want to do the unsupported updates by default, they're all turned on, you know, a lot of this stuff like the repositories that are turned on, just go with the defaults, I wouldn't play with any of this stuff unless you know what you're doing and have a reason to be playing around with these. But you also have this flat pack tab here. And this is the flat pack repositories that are enabled by default and flat hub is enabled by default, meaning if I search for a piece of software that's not in the apt package manager, for example, Debian's repositories typically don't include any non free software. So let's look for a proprietary piece of software that I know is available on flat hub discord. I'm going to hit enter. And let me click on it. And you see it gives us the repository that discord is found in. It is found in flat hub. It is also available from Papua as a Deb. So I actually could install discord as either a flat pack or a Deb. So that is rather nice that here inside their software center, because this is something not a lot of Linux distributions do. Most Linux distributions don't have their software center offering not only native package manager installs, but also the ability to install a third party packages through things like flat pack or snaps or app images. So that is nice that they have flat packs already integrated and ready to go out of the box. Let me close the pop shop. That's a really nice graphical software center, probably one of the best ones out there available for any Linux distribution. Now this is the file manager here. And this should just be the standard GNOME Nautilus file manager. If I go to about files, this is Nautilus 42.0, the absolute latest. I really like that icon set. That's a pretty sharp looking icon set. I know it's the little things, but you know, spit and polish. Papua S really knocks it out of the park. The GTK theme looks great. The icon theme looks great. The wallpaper, everything looks, you know, really coherent, cohesive. It looks like a professionally made piece of software, which of course it is. Also down here in the dock, we have our system settings. So this is very similar to the settings manager you see in other GNOME GTK based desktops. It's up the Papua S team. Have a few extra things that they configure. I mean, you have your standard stuff like network, Bluetooth desktop settings. And with the desktop options, we still have some of the same options that we saw in the welcome screen, like turning back on the workspaces button or turning it back off. I'll turn the applications off. Do we want to show a minimize button? So here is the minimize button for a window, right? I can minimize it to the dock and then unminimize it by clicking on it. But if I didn't want the minimize button, I could get rid of it. But then how do I minimize something? Hit right click. And is there an option? I'm not sure exactly how you would minimize a program. Maybe you just would never minimize a program. Maybe you just send it to its own workspace and just leave it there until you need it again. Me? Yeah, I kind of like having a minimize button. I also kind of like having the maximize button, although you don't necessarily have to have a maximize button to go full screen because I think everyone knows now that you can double click a title bar and most window managers to get a window to go full screen. So I guess you don't necessarily have to have the maximize button, but I'd probably turn all of that on by default, especially for new users that may not be familiar with double clicking a title bar. Also in desktop settings, we have our background options, the wallpaper pack. Most of these I've seen before, previous versions of Pop OS, a lot of really cool abstract art. Like this really neat stuff, this gorgeous wallpaper pack. I like this image here with the satellite. It was that Space X and floating over like a shoreline. Very cool. I'm going to go back to the default wallpaper because honestly, I think that looks really, really sexy. And then we have the light mode, dark mode again, dock settings, workspace settings. Where do you want the placement of the workspace picker? Do you want it along the left side? So if I go to workspaces, you know, there's the workspaces, but we could change that. We could tick it to have it on on the right side, which I don't know. Either one is probably fine for me. I'm going to go back to the default left side. You also have settings for notifications. You have applications here where you get a list of various applications and I'm assuming that some of these applications have things that you could turn on and off. For example, like you can turn on and off the notifications for specific applications. That's really neat privacy settings. I'm not going to get into that, but some of the really Pop OS specific stuff. We've got this firmware tab here where you could get firmware updates for various proprietary drivers and things like that, which here inside this VM, I don't have any of that stuff. But for those of you actually running this, especially running this on system 76 hardware, that's really nice that they have this stuff so tightly integrated to the operating system itself. Also, you'll notice we have OS upgrade and recovery down here. It's going to do a little spinning animation here while I'm assuming it's syncing the repositories. Yeah, it's checking for updates. Do we want to do automatic updates? Now that is a really nice feature because especially if you're installing Pop OS on like a family members machine and they're one of those family members that doesn't know much about computers and you know they're never going to update their machine ever, like you'll go back to their machine in three, four years and it's still never seen an update. You might want to tick on automatic updates and schedule it when to update. Typically, you'll want to schedule it in the middle of the night. You know, if it's assuming the computer is on in the middle of the night that show update notifications. So that's when you get notified about updates. So you've got all of that. You have this new support tab that I don't believe was here in previous versions of Pop OS. Certainly some of this stuff in this wasn't here before. Now when you click on the support tab, you get your model inversion QEMU. That's the type of virtual machine I'm using. Then we get our operating system inversion Pop OS 22 or LTS. Then you get documentation and you click browse here and I'm assuming that opens for our Fox. Yeah, and it takes us to support.system76.com. So their support website where you can search various articles, knowledge based articles, things like that. And then we have community support in Pop OS chat. So if I click join, will that join a chat room? Yeah, it opens up a chat site here inside Firefox using Mattermost. I'm not sure what Mattermost is, but you sign up for an account and I'm assuming you could chat with Pop OS support. And then we got create log archives for support. If you click the button, it's asking for sudo password. And yeah, log archive was created show and folder. Let me click that. And it created that and zipped it all up. Well, I actually it created a tar of it. So what this is for this obviously is for Pop OS support. So somebody is having a problem with their machine and they can go to the support tab and they've got all this information they can share with the support team, including creating these log files. And then, you know, they can just give those log files to the Pop OS support team and they'll know a lot about what was going on on this person's machine. So that is a really nice touch. Let me close out of the settings manager. Let's take a look at the calendar and this little widget here in the center. You know, it looks very nice and do not disturb. I like that we have that setting there. And we have our system tray here. Oh, tile windows. Of course, one of the things about Pop OS, their version of their genome desktop is they allow you to turn on tiling. If you so choose where it kind of is a tiling window manager, but it's not quite like your traditional tiling window managers because it's still one of the problems with the genome desktop is in a proper tiling window manager, every monitor should be its own workspace independent that way you can move things around where on a desktop environment that's a traditional floating desktop environment like Genome or KDE, you know, all of your monitors or one workspace, typically, and that's not really the way tiling window managers work. So if you're somebody that's used to the way most tiling window managers work, the workspace situation is going to bother you a little bit, but at least turning this on does make the windows automatically tile like now when I click that it takes up full screen, right? That's the file manager. Now let me open up the terminal and it should tile. Yeah. You know, it evenly tiles it on each half. So there is some very basic tiling functionality built in. I'm sure they're going to get that fleshed out a lot more in future versions as well. More stuff in the Cistray. We have our network manager volume manager and then of course the logout session by choose power off logout. Do we actually have a restart option? We do. Overall, I'm very impressed with Pop OS 2204 just a little bit of time I spent with it. It looks amazing. Looks great. Their version of Genome and a GTK based desktop already looks outstanding. And the fact that they are working on their own cosmic desktop environment hasn't been released yet. But when it is, you know, they're writing it from the ground up, writing it in Rust, which is great because, you know, everything should be rewritten in Rust. That's the meme these days, right? Write everything in Rust. But I'm looking forward to that because really these Linux distributions like Pop OS and like Ubuntu and various other distributions that use Genome, they shouldn't have to put in so much work to make the Genome desktop environment usable, you know, presentable to users. Like I can only imagine how much work the Pop OS team had to put in to make Genome look like this and function like this. And at some point, yeah, you're probably putting in so much work that it probably makes sense just to wipe the slate clean with Genome and just build your own thing. And I think that's great. Overall, I would say I would be happy installing this on friends and family member machines. If they brought me a computer that, you know, had a little bit of RAM, you know, don't bring me a potato. But if they brought me a decent machine that maybe had windows on it, maybe Windows is not working for them. It's riddled with viruses. They're looking to something to speed up their computer a little bit. Yeah, I would have no problem putting Pop OS 2204 on those kinds of machines. Now, before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I want to thank the producers of this episode. Devon Gabe James, Max, I'm Matt Michael Mitchell, Paul Scott West, Allen, Armoredragon, Chuck, Mandarin, Redo, Yo-Kai, Dylan, George Lee, Lennox, Ninja Mike, Ariane, Alexander, Pete, Sargeant, Vador, Polytech, Riala, Teets for Letts, Red Prophet, Steven and Willie, these guys. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, this episode about Pop OS 2204 would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen, all these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because without each and every one of these guys, I couldn't do what I do. I don't have any corporate sponsors. It's just me and you guys, the community, if you like my work and want to see more videos about Lennox and free and open source software, subscribe to Distro Tube over on Patreon. Peace.