Chris WiegmanSince I bought my Framework laptop in December I’ve struggled to make it really work for me. A big part of that has been in dealing with data, most of which I have in Apple these days. The other reason has been the distros I’ve tried, both Ubuntu and Fedora, have just seemed to be missing something.
In the case of Ubuntu, it just feels more half-baked than anything else. The insistence on Snaps makes it feel almost broken and, combined with the weird screen size of my laptop, it just feels and looks buggy to me.
In the case of Fedora it was Docker. I do a lot of me personal work with Docker, including Kana, and Fedora just simply doesn’t play well with it without a lot of extra work. To be fair it wasn’t Fedora’s fault and I loved the distro otherwise but it was enough for me to realize I needed to look for something else.
When I used Linux full-time from 2018 to 2021 I fell in love with Pop!_OS, a distro based on Ubuntu by System76, who also made the laptop I had at the time. I think, when I bought this laptop, I just assumed it wouldn’t work as well on hardware they didn’t make and, frankly, it was a bad assumption.
This past weekend I moved back to Pop!_OS on my Framework laptop and I’m in love with Linux again.
It looks great. It works with everything I need it to work with. It’s additions to Gnome work really, really well with my workflow and, overall, it’s a joy of an OS to use. I’m so happy with the change I once again find myself wondering how I could make Linux, with Pop!_OS or course, my full-time platform again.
Apple is working for my family. Especially with our Apple One Premier plan it really does have everything I need and everything I use. I never could come close to that on Linux except for when I moved all my data into Google’s ecosystem and I really don’t think I want to do that again.
For now I just need to remember that, when I did buy this laptop I set out to start to make it feasible for me to move back to Linux full time. This weekend I think I moved one step closer to that goal. Hopefully, in time, I’ll be able to finish the process.