Seconding Pop!_OS, utterly fantastic distro.

Based on Ubuntu but with a bunch of manual patches + tweaks and driver support additions (particularly Nvidia). Really solid stock UI, and it even comes with a tiling WM built in.

https://github.com/pop-os/shell

I've been using Pop!_OS on a System76 laptop since February, and like it quite a bit.

I use plasma desktop on all of my other systems, but left this one with the defaults.. so far I really like it, but I have a problem with gnome-shell leaking memory over time, since I tend to not shut down or log out over long periods of time. If I don't restart / log out, /usr/bin/gnome-shell eats up more and more memory (as the gdm user). I let it get up to about 7GB before I updated some firmware and rebooted the laptop.

I mean, I put 32GB of RAM in the thing in an attempt to future-proof it, but this is kind of bonkers.

Going to fire this up in a VM now and give it a go, maybe replace Ubuntu 20.04 with it.

I just tried out Mint but it installs SO much rubbish. It installs mysql?!?

I don't mind it installing some useful software but Mint goes overboard.

With 20.04 I'm constantly sitting at 20-27gb of used memory when doing dev work.

One thing which I very much liked about it is that the installer takes care of luks / cryptsetup.

I fired it up in a VM and it’s pretty awesome. Just trying to backup this dying hard drive before I reformat and put pop as my main.

OH. Pop!_OS is awesome. Thanks a lot!

I'm glad to hear that you're liking it!

Most notably, Pop OS (I'm doing the damn silly punctuation) takes all of the stuff that Ubuntu has made snap-only and builds them as debs. So it's basically Ubuntu de-snapified.

Any reason to use Pop!_OS over Mint, or vice versa?