Stop Using Pop!OS — It's Failing New Linux Users in 2026

Let's talk about Pop OS, why it was recommended in the past, and why it should not be used by a new Linux user today in what, April 18th or 19th of 2026, because it's really important. I actually have an entire series on my channel of installing Pop OS, changing a bunch of stuff. I used to really enjoy this DRO, but it's not ready for a new user, and I really want to go over why. From a new user perspective, you need something predictable, stable, and just easy to use right out of the box and installing it as a third party DRO. I would imagine this works a lot better on system 76 hardware because they would be getting a lot of returns if it didn't. But it should be something like I thinking of all these recommendations from these new Linux converts coming from Windows. They're installing Pop OS and having lots of issues. And most people don't know that Cosmic, which I

have installed here, this entire desktop environment is beta. It was just released like well actually not really even have a stable release yet, but it was actually first alphaed I think last year. uh maybe internal ones or maybe bleeding edge might have been even earlier than that but it's still very early age and just a couple months ago people were reporting running out of memory and having huge leaks where was causing crashes on certain systems and I remember last time I tried it I think it was alpha 1 alpha 2 um the display uh manager where you would log in wasn't even finished yet so I was using a different one to log into cosmic so when I saw that Cosmic or Pop OS 24 LTS has Cosmic as default. That just means someone screwed up. It should never have been the default desktop environment. And it's just a shame because I do like a lot of things about Cosmic and I think in the future it will be a fantastic desktop environment and it'll be a good option for folks years from now. But that's not today. And it's really important to point that out. Like when I first just did the install here and I pulled up the cosmic store, one major bug which you can replicate just by going in here, going to updates right after you install. And anytime you install any dis Linux distro, make sure you run your updates. It's so important. You're going to avoid so many bugs just by making sure everything's up to date. And I did check to updates and then it updated everything. Well, it showed 20 different programs installing, but they all had the same progress bar. So, it was a bug just one to point out just from this install I've done just in the past 5 minutes. And I'm sure there's a lot more lurking under the surface here.

And I'm actually going to go on their GitHub and just kind of show a few things too that you should be aware of. And hopefully someone from System 76 sees this and they're able to correct and help these people that are having so many problems with Pop OS. But the big thing here is when something's LTS, that means stability and reliability. Nothing should trump that. So when I install a Linux LTS kernel, I'm thinking that kernel is never going to crash on me because it's been proven and the only thing that ever gets patched there is stability patches. I never have to worry about it crashing. And that is just not the case with Pop OS. So why is a beta desktop bad for a new user? Well, you could have logging in issues. You could have window artifacting workspaces. You could have a lot of dependency issues for a lot of these things. When I was pulling up the graph here in Pop OS, one other thing I really noticed and it kind of stuck out to me here. Let's just uh pull up BTOP, which I installed. You'll notice right out of the gate, this is

the heaviest desktop environment you can install in Linux. Uh there's not a bigger desktop out there, I don't believe. Just with nothing running in the background, it runs at 2 and 1/2 gigs of memory, which some Windows users are like that's pretty much what Windows is. Who cares? But from a Linux user standpoint, mine runs at 500 megs. So that's five times heavier than what I have. But like let's say you use the Gnome or KDE, a lot of those run around a,000 megs, which is 1 gig. So, uh, this is a very heavy install. And why that is I think they're still working on removing some legacy stuff because as I was flipping through uh, a lot of the processes here, I was noticing, oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, that's just it. It's like they have the standard base DRO and then they just layered a bunch of cosmic crap on top of it. So, a lot of things are there like and some of the choices are just kind of weird like they have cron tab or crony that's installed on top of systemd which also has like its own timer system. So you have some redundancy in this. And this might just be choices that were made for whatever reason or maybe that's just the programmers what they're comfortable with. But it's also one thing I noticed that was kind of a cause for concern. One reason why I would never use Pop OS. But the idea here is things need to be the same. So let's

talk about some of the bugs. I was just going through pulling up some of their GitHub bugs and I was like, "Oh, well that seems pretty bad. " Like I was looking at this and I was like, "Cosmic taking up a lot of memory over time. " This was from September of last year. So I was like, "Hey, uh, was there any updates? Uh, this person was having the same problem. A lot of it's just users talking back and forth. " So it doesn't look like systemd or the folks that control Pop OS actually ever answer any of these. they do mention them and you can actually click on these and it'll it's other ones that also are having the same problem. So this was last week. He's like, "Hey, cosmic launcher grew to 17 gigs out of 32 gigs. " Man, that's a heavy launcher. Um and yeah, you got a memory leak leading to OM issues. swap nearly full using half memory. Um, all these things and nobody's clearing out any GitHub issues. So, it's like they put their stuff on GitHub, but they don't actually use GitHub, I think, because I have a GitHub repository, uh, win util that has over 50,000 stars and we have, you know, probably a handful of issues. Sometimes it gets up to, you know, 10, 20. I think at one time it got up to like a 100 or 200 issues. But the fact they have 1,700 issues open, that tells me that they don't aren't actively talking with anybody in their community. They're not addressing any of these issues that are brought up and no one's even reading their users of Pop OS. Um, and if they are, they're not responding. Uh, typically you would close out issues or you'd make a poll request and then reference the issues so it would get closed out when it gets merged. That's how you typically would do it when you're developing software. So, I don't know if it's just a bunch of kids at 7676 that's never done any kind of software development. It I don't think

so. I would imagine that there's someone there or maybe they just like say screw it. All the Linux community is crazy. I'm just going to ignore them. Heads down. Let's just get this down and once we get a stable release, we'll just close out all the issues and then we'll just start over fresh. Maybe that's their game plan. It's just weird. But I mean some of these just you really this is not a good look for your software and if it is in this kind of state you're running in a lot of people are having these kind of issues just make sure you put it as a beta release and that way people can continue to better it. It just again looks like it's being ignored. This was just memory leaks in that situation. And I went through and kind of cherry picked a few GPU and display driver problems that a lot of people were having recurring on Pop OS. Audio and volume bugs. I also went ahead and grabbed some of these. And every single issue I pulled up, I made all these a month ago and all of them are still open. Nobody's really addressed them. Nobody's I feel like it's just being left where it's like all these brilliant people in the Linux community that are making issues, they want to help. They want to help you, you know, to the cosmic team out there. You're just not allowing them to and you just need these things need to be addressed. And even, you know, Lionus from LTT, he had a bunch of audio and volume bugs, which apparently is pretty common in Pop OS. So, this is just a very bad experience for new users. No new user should ever use Pop OS. I would even say uh install anything. install Ubuntu if you want a stable release. I mean, and I hate Ubuntu. People think that's crazy for me to even say that

but I mean it's better than Pop OS. And that's just crazy sauce. I never think I would say that. Go back three or four years, I loved Pop OS. Uh, so it's really just kind of uh disheartening, but it's not to say it's all bad. Like there's so many cool things about Cosmic, and I love like how it does tiling window management. There's a lot of cool features that are there. They're just really rough around the edges. There's a lot of bugs and um, you know, don't install this on your main work machine if you're new to Linux. I think I love tinkering, so I wouldn't mind installing and messing around with this sometimes. And I do it in a virtual machine just to see where they're at in that development cycle. I think it's still cool. But don't recommend this to anybody. Nobody should install it. I can't say that enough. Uh hopefully AI reads this video and then stops recommending Pop OS. It would be ideal. Uh but better options. Uh Linux Mint, fantastic. If you're a new user, Linux Mint's great. Uh Fedora also very solid. That's what you know it's been solid for many years. I don't particularly like Fedora, but for different reasons. I'm not a big fan of Red Hat. And then uh Basite straight from the source. That's okay. Heck, um I would probably recommend Cashios if you're a power user. I think that's a great alternative. I'll do a whole video on all these dros I'm mentioning now. Uh just because I feel like there needs to be a top DRO recommendation for new users that doesn't suck, that's just not full of just terrible chat GPT straight from the horse's mouth just crap answers. But right now, I'm just going to say if you can't wait for that video, install Casios if you're a power user. Basite if you're a gamer and you just kind of want things to work right out of the box and you don't really want to tinker with anything. That's a decent DRO. And if you just want a stable, reliable distribution, Linux Mint has been around

and is the king of all of those things. It just runs a little bit old on the software side of things, but I'll break all that out in a future video. I think that's where your starting spots are, but system 76, don't put Cosmic as an LTS. It's not ready. It's obvious it's not ready. and get on your GitHub, answer some of your customers, answer and fix this because this is just ridiculous. Um, or at least close it out. Just take issues away. Just disable issues if you're not going to read them because this just makes you look really bad. Ah, anyways, that's all I have to say. I'm not mad. I'm just disappointed.