 Pop OS is one of those distributions that has aimed to take a boon to and make it better And I think over the last few years the people behind Pop OS system 76 has really they have really done a really good job of Taking a boon to and making it better now There's a lot of things going on with system 76 and pop OS outside of the extra distribution We know that they're moving away from a GNOME based desktop environment and moving into something of their own creation But until that time comes we do have a brand new pop OS release and that is pop OS 21 dot 10 now Frankly, I think that their naming scheme is kind of bad because it wasn't released in October And I know what they're doing. They're basing it on the Ubuntu number But I think if they're gonna try to do their own thing they should come up with their own naming scheme But that's beside the point today what we're gonna do is take a look at five of the best features on pop OS 21 dot 10 and I will say this there aren't a ton of new features here This is definitely a more of a polish update than a new features update and that's okay The last release that we saw was the first released. I believe of the cosmic desktop So it's good that they've gone through and spent a few months Kind of polishing the rough edges and that's what we're gonna see today. So let's go ahead and jump in So I have a brand new install of pop OS 21 dot 10 here Now the only thing I've done is ran through the Initial setup where they allow you to choose what kind of doc you want whether or not you want later dark theme that kind of thing That's not new that was here before but it's really still really good The first thing and probably the biggest thing of this release that you'll notice is the new app drawer Now they're calling it the application library. That's a little pretentious for me. It's an app drawer So if we click on this icon here, this is what the app drawer now looks like now If you've used pop OS in the past, you'll know that this looks significantly different than it used to because it used to be Just the GNOME applications panel anytime you hit the applications icon. You'd get this full screen list of applications There's no organization whatsoever out of the box. You can create folders and stuff like that but that's usually on you to do and Other than that, it's just a gigantic list of applications This comes pre-sorted by defaults We have folders down here at the bottom and you can create new a new folder if you'd like to and it also allows you to edit the Folders that are already there so you don't you're not stuck with this categorization if you don't want to use that That's cool. You can just hit the button up here. You can rename it You can get rid of the folders You can drag things around just like you could with the previous app drawer And of course there's search here if you need to search for something You don't feel like going through and searching through manually So that is probably the biggest feature of pop o s 21.10 and I have to say I really like it It's not necessarily completely different different than what GNOME does and I think that that is a good thing because a lot of people are Used to that gigantic list of app, you know grid of applications This is similar so people aren't going to get lost or be upset about it But it's different enough that it kind of stands out So I really actually quite enjoy this and I could see myself being happy with this as well So that is probably the biggest feature the next one on the list is one that I really can't show you because it is something for a different device so pop o s 21.10 now supports the raspberry pi and I think this is important because more and more Linux distributions are supporting the raspberry pi and that's Really great because that means more and more work is being put into arm support on Linux And the more arm support we have the better We're going to be prepared for when the inevitable future comes and everything is based on arm So I think that this is a really good step now with the support of raspberry pi now We'll be able to see more development for hardware support on arm based devices And I think that's that is really important So if you have a raspberry pi now you can try out pop o s 21.10 on that device It does note that it is in development phase. So you're probably going to expect some Bugs if you try this out So don't use this as a as a production machine at least right out of the bat But I would expect development process for that to go really quick because they are a Distro based on Ubuntu and Ubuntu has an Raspberry pi image so they should be able to take a lot of stuff from Ubuntu in order to make their version of Pop o s for raspberry pi much better. So that is number two So the next one is something that I'm not all that familiar with but from what I've read is that pop O s has had a feature now called pop o s refresh for a little while and basically what this will do It will allow you to go through and reinstall your operating system or your Linux distro in this case Without deleting any of your personal files. It also apparently handles all of your o s upgrade So if we go to the settings application here and Scroll all the way down to the bottom and do o s upgrade and recovery in this panel here Is where we'd find pop o s refresh now or at least from what I can tell that their Release notes weren't all that in-depth on how you actually get to this I'm also assuming that if you and have pop o s installed And then you went from like an alive iso if you booted into a live iso And they came up it would tell you that you have pop o s ref Pop o s installed and then give you an option to refresh it instead of just completely nuking a page So I miss I'm thinking that that's the way it works I can't test that and there's not a good description of how this works But I it has said that pop o s refresh has gotten some new features But it didn't actually say what those new features are so if we actually go to Get out of this VM here and go to a browser here So your system will now be able to recognize pop o s installed from the recovery partition and offer the refresh OS So I was wrong. It's not a live iso. It's from a recovery partition so this is very much similar to what some OEM manufacturers do and When you get a brand new computer it has an operating system on a lot of times There will be a separate partition that will allow you to recover your device should something go wrong with the main partition and This is not surprising given that system 76 is a hardware vendor so that they could do this But I'm wondering how this would work if you install this on like a non system 76 device I would wonder if they would go through and do that partition as well on that device or if it's just system 76 Stuff there'll be something to test out in the future So number four on the list is better hardware support and this is something again that I can't really show you But according to the release notes system 76 has put in a lot of effort to make sure that Papa West will Play nicely with the most recent hardware now this includes obviously the most recent kernel So if we go through and do you name? dash a here we'll see that this using Linux kernel 5.15.5 and They've also gone through and started to change the way they use kernels So I can't really explain. I don't have all the details. I haven't read up on it But I know that they're going through and changing the source of the currency They used to take the Ubuntu kernel now they're taking I believe they're taking the mainline kernel I could be wrong about that But I know that they're making that change and what that should mean is that the most recent hardware support That is baked into the Linux kernel will come to Papa West quicker than if they had to wait for that to be filtered from Ubuntu So that is kind of good So because a lot of people when they switch to Linux or switching to Linux on really new hardware So we've seen things like Linus tech tips things where he tried Papa West and he just unfortunately happened upon a System-ending bug and didn't read the output But the point is a lot of people who want to use Linux want to try Papa West because they've heard good things about it And it's good that that Papa West is working very hard to make sure that the most recent hardware supported And again, it makes sense because they are a hardware vendor by trade So a better hardware support is definitely one of those Features that we should all be happy about and the last one is some more recent versions of GNOME applications now I don't know how important this is given that they're going to be switching away from you know But they're gonna still be using some GNOME applications. So similar to what Ubuntu has been doing they've gone through and kind of put together a poppery of GNOME applications from different versions so for the terminal here we have 3.38 which is Pretty old why they haven't gone through and done a new one yet. I don't know. It's just the terminal for files here We have version 40.2 And if we go to the applications here for say the calendar, we have Version 41 so as you can see It's kind of a mixed mash of GNOME versions and I think that that's something that we're gonna see a lot more of We're gonna see distro developers kind of picking and choosing what applications get updated And it's gonna make things really confusing for Linux YouTubers because we're gonna have to go through and actually kind of Parse what versions of which are on here and it's not gonna be the same across distros anymore It's it's gonna be a royal pain, but that's kind of what they've been doing So a lot of stuff here has been updated to newer GNOME versions not necessarily the newest But they but some of the stuff will be newer than it was in the previous version of you know Or of pop OS so what you should be able to do is expect this stuff to be very stable because they're not using bleeding edge GNOME Software which sometimes has a tendency to be a little bit buggy or they've gone through and remove features from that More recent GNOME stuff, so you should be able to stay on the older versions and still have those features so that is pop OS 21.10 and It's a really good release. There's not a ton of new features, but I really like the application drawer I'm gonna call it the application drawer because application library doesn't Sound great to me, but the I really do like it I think that they've done a good job of polishing this to make it even better than it was before and It'll be interesting to see I mean it because it makes a lot of sense that they won't put a lot of effort into putting new features Into this for this desktop environment knowing that they're going to be changing in the future Now we don't know when they're going to be changing to do whatever they're calling it I think they're gonna be calling a cosmic desktop so But we don't know when that's going to happen. It could be the next release It could be two or three releases from now. It depends on how long it takes them to make that development work So we could see several releases like this that are just kind of minor updates, but we'll see how that goes So that is it for this video if you have thoughts on Papa West 21.10 You can leave those in the comment section below. You can follow me on Twitter at the Linux cast You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash Linux cast before I go. I would like to take a moment to thank my current patrons Today Devon Chris East goes web gen 2 is fun to Patrick all primus Marcus makelyn Jackson tool Steve a Mitchell art center and Matthias carbon dated merit camp drash really J dog the BSTs rock Peter a crucible. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time