TOP OF THE POP!_OS
Readers in the US who are on the lookout for a Linux machine could do a lot worse than hit up Denver-based System76 and grab one of its fine desktops or laptops. Nope, this isn’t an advertorial, this is just fact. We’ve been impressed by System76’s efforts ever since it launched its first machines in the mid-naughties. We’d recommend them to UK readers too, but transatlantic shipping is a little pricey. Oh, and the reference to the 1776 American Revolution twinges our government-mandated nationalistic sensitivities a tad, too.
Be that as it may, System76 has also been shipping its own Linux distribution since 2017. And it’s not just for its hardware too – it works great on other PCs. Far from being just another Ubuntu spin, Pop!_OS runs a different bootloader, uses its own shell (dubbed COSMIC, for Computer Operating System Main Interface Components), and even has its own power scheduler. Which makes it ideal for laptops.
We hit up System76 software engineer and Pop!_OS maintainer Michael Murphy to discuss the latest Pop release, a bug that hit the social media big time and the challenges faced by Gnome-based distros that don’t want to look like Gnome. And not content with all that activity, System76 is big into the Rust programming language. So much that the company is making a new Rust-powered desktop. We’re sure you want to hear about it just as much as we do. So read on…
RUST’S APPEAL IN A NUTSHELL
“After spending some time with
