 So we're going to take a look at POPOS, a step forwarding user experience. I kind of like that slogan because, well, after using it for a week, I really feel that way about POPOS. And we're going to talk specifically about the 18.04 version. That's the latest version that's out right here in May of 2018. It comes in a couple flavors here. We got the Intel AMD and the Nvidia flavor. Now if you're not familiar with how this works, if you're not new to Linux and you're wanting to try this out and you're going, which one's for me? Well, do you have an Nvidia graphics card? Do you want all the full features that come with the proprietary and Linux, Nvidia driver on Linux? Well, you download the Nvidia version, which is what I actually downloaded from my desktop because I have an GTX 760 card. And out of the box, it supported all the features of the card. Do you want to load the driver separately or you're fine with whatever open source drivers you can get? You can download the Intel AMD one or, for example, for my laptop, which is a low powered I5 IBM X250. I'll download the Intel AMD distro, which doesn't have the Nvidia drivers set up by default and it works perfectly fine on my laptop. So those are the two spins that they have on there and I thought this was really convenient because a lot of times you have to do, if you're in my situation with my video card is you load Linux and then you deal with the less than great graphics driver it may have and then you load the extra driver and say yes a lot. Being able to do that right out of the box, really a great feature that they had here. Now, System76, who are they? They're a custom builder of really nice laptops, desktops and servers that were designed for Linux and they ship them directly with Linux on there. So they're not like you have to load them with Linux. When you get them, they come shipped with Linux and no Windows on them at all. Matter of fact, the question would be, will they even run Windows? I don't know. I don't even know if anyone's even tried. I don't know. It's not real relevant. Now, is it just a re-spin of Ubuntu? No, and we'll talk about that right here. I like what they had in this opening line. So we build PopOS with the philosophy of sticking to upstream decisions by default, but deviating when it provides a better experience for our customers and users. Our decisions around user experience are informed over a decade of selling Linux computers and listening to our customers feedback. Now, something I like about the way PopOS works, in case you're wondering, I'm not running a system by System76, but I am running PopOS and I've loaded PopOS on my IBM laptop. They're not saying you only can run this on their system. And I like that a lot that they're like really throwing it out there that they want to make a better Linux to show. And this is something really important because I didn't want it to be something you only get with theirs. I was worried when I first heard they were doing this, that they were going to do something like that. I mean, seemed unlikely, but you just want to clarify that. They are very open. It is all open source. It is all posted on GitHub. They're very open about the entire process, their design process. And everything that's included in here. So right here, there's the GitHub link. And you can see everything that System76 does. So anyone's wondering, all this stuff is on here. And of course, they do a lot of general contribution back to the open source community. It's been really nice running this operating system. So let's go ahead and walk you through the install real quick. I'm not going to run through the installer as a video because it's just too clean. And it doesn't really, it's so next. And yes, it's not worth the time to set this up. Just to do the demo. It literally is pop it in at a bootable USB, download the ISO. Next, yes, click install pop OS, erase the hard drive, choose the password to fully, to fully encrypt your hard drive because it does support drive encryption. If you choose a weak password, it'll give you a warning. You if you're going to bother encrypting a drive, at least don't make the password password. Then go ahead, extract files, something not in here. But I thought this is cool. If you click this little button right here, it shows you why the hard drive thrashing. It tells you everything that's being installed. I thought that's kind of cool. So you can either stare at this rocket while it goes across or click that. And done, restart device and you're in. Now, once you're in, let's get this out of the way and show you what you're presented with. I did customize the background, which you can change the background theme. It has a handful of pictures built in. So if you go to backgrounds, they have some of the system 76 ones. I think this is the one that comes by default. And I, you know, I like my, you know, I am root background. So I changed that. So right here's what, you know, the first screen when you boot up, minus the background, you have your activities up here. You're standard. If you're used to the gnome environment, it's very standard gnome like they've done a few shortcuts and things like that to make things different. We'll cover the keyboard shortcuts in just a second because that's something I really like. And I think they did a great job on. So I have Firefox here file manager and we have the pop shop. I already added Chrome and shutter and a couple of things I pinned here. The pop shop is somewhere. If you're new to Linux, this is really nice. Now, I don't use a lot of these stores that are built in, but this is something that's really becoming more popular and windows people are getting more familiar with what an app store is. Now, this has been around for a long time in the Linux world where, especially in the, in the WN based distributions that use apt, you can apt get install whatever application you want. That is how I still do things, but I'm a long time seasoned veteran of Linux for new users that can be a little bit daunting. They're going, I'm not used to opening up the command line. I don't know what to type when I get there. Well, if you're not sure what to do, just pop this open and you can go, I want to find an audio application and they have a list of them here. They have internet applications. So if you want to load things, they have science and engineering, graphics, games. A lot of people want to play some of the games in here. And what this is, is this is the pop shop as a curated list of things that are on, that you can load into the system with just a quick click. So if we go here systems and you find the thing you're looking for, you just click it and away you go. And I'll give you an example of that. So like here's G Smart Control, the hard drive in tool. And we're going to click install. You're prompted for authentication. Authenticate downloads, installs. Now we can launch this application. Now this application requires higher privileges. So when you open it and launch it, it's still prompting for privileges. And I can see that great, my hard drive is good here. And this hard drive is good too. So this is just a tool to look at the smart status on things. If I didn't want this utility, I click on install and it goes away. Now you're probably wondering, where did that show up at? So if we go here and we go out activities and we type in G Smart, there it is. I can launch it again from here. So they made this pretty easy to do. Now something else that is a little bit trickier for people when you go through and you install these applications because you're new to Linux, you want to put all the things, you put everything with the kitchen sink in there. This becomes really easy because you go to the installed list and then you can remove anything. So if you didn't want that tool, whoops, go back to the install list, there's G Smart Control. I can just uninstall it just as easily and get it off of my system. So I like the PopShop. It's definitely pretty cool. They got a great list of curated apps in here. Most of them are really good. They're things that I use. So I was kind of cool to see when I went through this and I'm not gonna bore you with every detail in there but there's a lot of great stuff in here and including something nice. They put some of the common business use apps like Slack in here. Some people like Telegram, Steam. I didn't try Steam, Spotify. So a couple of those are things in here and there's also a virtual box. I thought was cool that they had. So you can actually just go right in there and install virtual box. Oops, I got to spell that right. There we go, virtual box. And I have that installed in here. So one of the nice things too if you're not familiar with Linux, once you've installed any of these, they become part of the updates. So all these applications will get updated while the OS gets updated as well. Now to do any of the updates, I don't have any here to show you but they pop up over here and they let you know that there's system updates. You can customize how and when the updates are loaded. Unlike other operating systems that make this kind of a pain to do, they make this really easy to do. So when your updates, where to get the updates from, extra sources and things like that. So I won't get real in depth in that. Maybe later video I'll talk about how you can customize more of the updates. But they made it pretty straightforward and simple. So that's the application store. Like I said, that's pretty handy. And let's walk through the settings in here. Now this is something I really like the way they did this. You go to activities and let's say I wanted to do about the system. The search can find things and land you right where you want to end. So here's the about showing that I have PopOS 1804, 64 bit version, 16 gigs of RAM, Core i7-4770K, and a GeForce TX-Sense 50. What if I want to fix my display settings? Where's that at? Well, if I just type in display, I can open up the settings or I can go directly to the display. This from a usability standpoint, especially new users, this is great because people just don't know where things are. And of course being that they did things a little bit different is still handy for me. Switching from a KDE based distribution to this Nome based desktop was really easy to find things. And like I said, with the NVIDIA driver, it supported my triple monitors right out of the box. So you can choose my primary display, I can move them around. You notice it's displaying the numbers here, so when you go back to a three screen view, it will display all the numbers of them. So there you can rearrange and drag your monitors around and make them the way you want. Now, let me go back to the middle screen. Any of the settings you can apply, so if you're changing resolutions or everything else, pretty straightforward. There's no save button on things. It does have an apply for here, but if you're changing things over in some of the other areas, I'm gonna go back over here to notifications. If you want notifications not to pop up, it just sliders on and off, so it's very foam-like. So let's talk about the settings in general. So if you wanna get to the settings, just to bring you to the settings themselves, SATT or activities and all your stuff is right here under applications and you can just scroll through everything that's in here. And I think they're kind of merging. I'm used to seeing this a lot on a phone experience and they've kind of brought these things together and I actually find it very easy to use. So if you open up the settings, there's no Wi-Fi adapter in here or Bluetooth, but they're there on my laptop and pretty easy to, pretty easy and straightforward. Like I said, I'll maybe do more in depth review later, but I just wanna give you kind of an overview of things. Notifications are a little different. Now, the notifications here and here's the different things that I have on here and turned on and they all show up here at the top. And once again, kind of reminds me of a phone-like experience. We have a do not disturb here. You may have noticed that some of these calendar options are blue. Well, the reason why is because we're gonna go over here to online accounts. It lets you integrate some of your online accounts right into the operating system. So my notifications from my Google Calendar and I don't know what all the integrates of Microsoft, I don't have a Microsoft account to test that. I don't know why you'd wanna integrate Facebook into your known desktop, but that's an option. They have these in there. But with you using Google Calendar both on my business and my personal, I'm able to easily see notices and things like that or when I don't wanna see them, go here. So my calendar notifications show up. Once again, changing the background's easy. Controlling what apps are allowed to put notices up there. Very handy to do. Also, if you notice at the top of your network settings, so here's my wire connection and you can jump right to the network settings. And you notice even though I opened it from here, it brings you in this window that's already open. If I were to close this window, the same thing would bring me as a workflow right over there and let you customize the network setup. Overall, they've done a great job of just keeping everything very, very clean and easy to read and easy to change your network settings. So here's the network settings, my computer's IP address and everything else. IBP4 settings, DNS automatic, automatic or set manual, I can type in my IP address. So easy enough to do this or disable the network card if you have multiple ones on here. Pretty straightforward setup. Maybe I'll do another video separate, but on my laptop, the VPN setup was really easy to do. Had no problem. Matter of fact, it imported my VPN settings that I exported to a file right in and just worked. So hats off to making that really nice. Sound, I did have to change this out of the default because for some reason it thought the Yeti was my default sound card. But of course, most people may not have this issue because you probably don't have a blue Yeti attached to your system in multiple outputs, including HDMI and everything, but it does support multiple sound card outputs that I have, and I have a few different options on my system from digital to standard line out, which I have studio monitors inside. Works perfectly fine for that. Not much in a power options, but on my laptop, it's got a whole list of things that show up here, including like battery options. So very laptop friendly and you can choose things like what happens when the power button is pressed and also what happens when you close the lid, whether or not it's in a docking station. Those options all show up on my laptop. Of course, this is a desktop, so it's smart enough not to have those. Here's the network settings that you got to from clicking here, and then back to the details and devices. So it's all pretty straightforward for your usage and getting started with it, but I will cover the keyboard shortcuts because this is really clever the way they have the desktop layout. So it's a combination of desktop usability with keyboard shortcuts. Now being able to manipulate your operating system from the keyboard, the graphics of it is really handy. And I'm a power user, so I'm sitting from my computer a lot, moving between things, getting a lot of work done, and not having to slide something over with a mouse all the time to find it is really nice. Now the first thing you may notice is they went with the kind of less is more concept of not having a bunch of buttons up here. Out of the box by default, they're nothing here. You don't have a minimize, you just have a close button so you can close it, drag it around by the title bar, double click the title bar for max, and not maximize and just go to the corners and resize it. I'm fine with that. Now if you're not fine with that, I will cover real quick, go here to the pop shop and go to load gnome tweaks. Now gnome tweaks allows you to customize and start fixing things that you save. You know what, I gotta have a minimize button. I need to have that because my workflow requires me to minimize things. This is gnome tweaks and it's in the pop shop and it's easy to start messing around and changing everything around if you want. The only thing I really did with gnome tweaks though was this, workspace on primary display, workspaces span displays. And I'll show you how the workspaces work, but by default it only wants it on the primary display and what that ends up doing is, let me show you what workspaces are. This is the one thing I did customize from being stock. So this is my three monitors set up and these are the workspaces which are these two spots over here. And if you don't have it spanning the displays, it only spans the primary display back and forth. So when I wanna use up and down to different workspaces, which are essentially different desktops, it would only do the primary display so I did customize that. Other than that, I've left this at default. Go back to single screen set up. So let's talk about the shortcuts and how they work and how the workspaces work and kind of how these things work together and get you an idea of how I'm using it. So I'm gonna open up a terminal here. And to make this easier to use, I'm using a little tool called screen key and this allows you to see what buttons I'm pressing. I just learned about this the other day. It's pretty cool and I'm easy enough to set up in here. Do a separate video on that sometime. So right here we have two separate windows and I'm on the main workspace. So if you wanna switch workspaces, we can press the super key, which you may call the Windows key and we can switch to another workspace right here. So now I'm on a separate workspace. Now if we use super key up, brings me to the top workspace, super key down brings me to the bottom workspace. And the reason you're only seeing two workspaces is because it creates them dynamically. So let's say we have something we wanna put on another workspace. So this workspace is the primary one I'm using and let's move something over to the other one. We're gonna drag this to the other workspace and automatically it created another workspace under it. So it always leaves you one more. And this is one of the reasons from a workflow standpoint, I don't really need a minimize button or a show desktop button. It does have those abilities but we can just do this. I arrow down until I get to a new workspace. So super key down and I'm on a clean workspace and let's launch something like a calculator. And now this is on this workspace but by populating this workspace, now we have a fourth workspace. So you can see how these will clean up. Now, other thing to notice when you press the super key and this is just general workflow and this has made it really easy. You press the super key on a clean workspace and let's open up Caden live. You just type, start typing the letters you want and away you go, you can launch the application. Now I can do this obviously by going to activities and clicking with the mouse and doing this and finding the application I want or saving the application to a shortcut as a favorite which by the way, if you wanna save something as a favorite, you right click on the app and say add to favorites but I hardly find myself using the favorites part over here. It's mostly I know the things I wanna run and I can just go ahead and run them simply by hitting super P press enter. I'm right at the application I want, super key up. I'm going back to another desktop, super key up. I'm at another desktop and away you go. So you can see from a workflow it's pretty slick. Now let's get into some of the other shortcuts and how you view them. So the other option too is of course the usual that we're used to is we're gonna clean up all these different desktops that I have and once you go up, they all disappear. So now we're back to just having one and one clean one and this is obviously just floating. It's not maximized. I can double click to maximize it or if we press control super up that maximizes it, control super down that's gonna make it here. So it's easy to move and it's not maximized anymore. Control super left brings it over here control super right over here. So let's go ahead and open up another tab. So open up Google and do that. Now you can see pretty quickly we've side by side something. What if we want to side by side something else? Well, let's open up Kelk and same thing I can make it full screen but let's say I wanted to copy some data. I can just do that or I can swap it back over back and forth by moving and let's say I want to get between these things. I can alt tab just like normal. Now alt tab and super tabs seem to do exactly the same thing in here. But you can use either which is nice. Couple of other things on there. So you can just close the window with this. So let's open up the calc again and we can just hit super key w and now we close that window. So they have a whole list of them here and I'll leave a link below so you can get to them but this works really nice. One other thing I'll cover is when you are dealing with it and let's just open up another site like Google again and you're doing the alt tab alt tab and down arrow. Once you're over that device you can see each thing running. Now let's show you what happens with like a terminal. So you open up a terminal window and we have let's say a new terminal window over here. We alt tab. There's our Firefox showing both of them. There's our terminal showing both of them and then you can go down arrow and slip them if you have more terminals and more terminals then we'll go back to the alt tab. Whoop, too many things opened up. Alt tab. Here's all the different terminals and they show up down here. Now the other thing to note is dragging things around as I've made a cluttered mess of desktops. Let's drag a couple terminals over here another one over here and we'll go to this one. When you alt tab and it's been spread across different workspaces we alt tab for the terminal. It slides you over to the workspace that has that terminal on there. So like I said from a usability standpoint it seems confusing because I'm typing a lot of keys at once but this has made it really handy in order to get things done. Do that, exit on this one. And now I've got too many things showing up here. We're gonna close that too. And same thing, super key. There, I just closed it right away. Super W. It really hasn't taken me long to learn all these keyboard shortcuts. It's fairly intuitive. You just get used to keeping your finger on the super key and moving around. And like I said, it's made my workflow very efficient very fast and be able to do things. So last thing I want to talk about though is file management. Now the file manager in here is based on Nautilus. Let me close, clean up. Open this up, drag it over here. It's clean, nice. Same with all the design philosophy that they've had and pretty intuitive to use as well. So let's talk about a couple features though that I really think is interesting. First, if you want to bookmark something I've got a couple things bookmarked here. So I've got my three TB storage drive in here. Video main, this is where all my YouTube videos go. But let's say I wanted to take something wherever you find it, like my LTS folder where we keep our business documents. You can just right click on it. Open a new tab, open another application. Some of the usual options, compress it, open in a terminal here, which I do like that you can just grab a terminal window right in there because sometimes, and I'm gonna show you something in the videos here, if we open a terminal here, you notice the long string that is this? Because this is on an encrypted volume, it shows the mountain name of the volume there. So it's nice being able to do that without having to try and jump into something, a CD into some long file name. So that's rather clever. But the bookmarking is pretty straightforward so we can just go ahead and open up this, a similar. And once you're in there, you go over here and we can just go ahead and hit the little bookmark tab to bookmark this location. So if you have somewhere that you frequently visit like my video file or the SML file here, you can just add them to your shortcuts and away you go. So wherever you're at, you just go here and you can bookmark it. I'll get my face out of the way here. A couple other options. You can also show hidden files, reload visible columns, and choose other things that you may want to have in there. Last one, ask any recency. It's got a couple of things or just reset to default or rearrange these on here. Owners, group, permissions, et cetera. Now if you're copying files, I like the way they keep this all together. So let's go over here so we can find a big file and here's that Starrack video. So we'll go here and we're gonna open up the folder here. So control L if you're wondering, it's MB. So type in SMB to open up a SambaShare and we'll go over here to this one. And it prompts you for whatever the username is. You can save something. This is actually an open connection. I'm just gonna dump it to this folder and we're gonna paste. Now what you get is you're like, where's those files? Where are they moving? Where's the little box? Keeping with the simplicity of things, it's here. So this allows you to expand out and see what's being transferred, the speed at which is being transferred at like 75 megs a second as it copies over here. So they keep it all nice, clean and consolidated so there's nothing really bothering you while files are transferring and being moved but you get the little percentages up here so you can keep going on and keep working with whatever you're doing. I do like this as a feature to be able to unclutter, so to speak. And that's I think a lot of the concept that Papa West tries to keep on there. And once you're done, it lets you know a little pop up here that the files are copied and I can just click on it and go right back to that folder. Double click it and now I'm here. And anytime you mount an external storage device they show up here. So I'm gonna go ahead and delete this because I don't really need it, delete permanently, delete folders empty. And this right here will let me unmount that. Now another thing, if you're not familiar with SSH configs, in your SSH folder, you can set up a config file and what this config does is build out the names and IP addresses of different servers and parameters so you connect to them. So instead of just typing in SSH username and IP address, you can save them all in this config file. So for example, here's my mail server, hostname, user, root, port, the identity file that I wanna use if I wanna use a different one on here. That being said, that allows me to do this so I can SSH right into my mail server. Easy enough. But with their Nautilus integration, it does this as well. So if I hit control L again and I SFDP, so that's the secure file transfer protocol and I type in mail server. Same thing. I can actually get right to the file manager and it mounted into the mail server, which is right here. So then I can also unmount it. Great integration there. It makes it convenient when you have to manipulate files because I use SFDP and my SSH keys often to work on websites and this allows me to quickly go in there via the file manager and open it up because once you've opened up things in the file manager, let's open it back up again and show you all your usual suspects. Whoops. I hit super key L and locked myself out. I meant to hit control L to get back to this. Open up the mail server again. Your usual search is to start finding things. Actually work in will index the file system. Then I can right click, open with other application, choose an application to work with this for all applications. And now I can work inside of a file that opened up. And if you look at how it's run over here, it's the GNOME Virtual File System. That's what stands for GNOME Virtual File System. So it disallows you to take something that was mounted, then edit it with an application running on your desktop to go back and save in here. So this level of integration is fully supported in 1804 PopOS. So that's really nice. Like overall, I'm really happy with PopOS. I've only used it for a week. The keyboard shortcuts seem very natural. We're very easy for me to manipulate and learn how to use, being able to shuffle around everything through this interface and the multiple desktops feels really intuitive and well thought out. The polish they put on here with the better fonts and everything else. I'm really happy with this. I'm wondering where they're going to take it next. Like they've done such a good job and I feel comfortable with it even after a week completely changing from a different desktop environment which was the KDE desktop environment back to a GNOME desktop environment. Like I said, I'm really happy with it and go ahead and head over to Popo System76 slash Popo. Leave links below and download it and give it a spin. Try it in demo mode and if you like it as much as I do go ahead and wipe your systems and reload it. Make sure you're back up first. All right, thanks. Thanks for watching. If you like this video, go ahead and click the thumbs up. Leave us some feedback below to let us know any details, what you like and didn't like as well because we love hearing the feedback or if you just want to say thanks, leave a comment. If you wanted to be notified of new videos as they come out, go ahead and subscribe and the bell icon that lets YouTube know that you're interested in notifications. Hopefully they send them as we've learned with YouTube. Anyways, if you want to contract us for consulting services, you go ahead and hit launch systems.com and you can reach out to us for all the projects that we can do and help you. We work with a lot of small businesses, IT companies, even some large companies and you can farm different work out to us or just hire us as a consultant to help design your network. 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