Is there any way to use Pop without the gnome backend? Gnome and Pop both ship with Nautilus, and apparently don't work well without it, but Nautilus doesn't have type-ahead navigation. This is when you are in a directory and start typing the first few letters of the file you want to get to. In Windows Explorer, that will just lead to the cursor skipping ahead, whereas in Gnome, this starts a search for the file. It's absolutely appalling behaviour, and the developers are obstinate to a fault at changing this, despite outcry.
Thanks a lot for the list. "Luckily" not deal-breakers that would warrant a shift for me. I have been using Ubuntu without any complaints as daily driver for a year or so. But as I plan to get a new laptop in the future I contemplated whether I should try a new distro as well.
There are other reasons but for one Pop doesn't push Snap. Flatpak is available and well integrated, but isn't forced down your throat (as Snap is in Ubuntu).
I generally prefer flatpak but I feel snap is a bit ahead and for one simple reason: marketing.
Canonical has been pushing very hard for snaps and it shows when I get get official builds of things like Zoom, Visual Studio Code, JetBrains and Spotify but the flatpak versions are just community provided. Some of them tend to work better than flatpak as well because of “classic” confinement. Using VS Code in flatpak and not having full access to the system in my integrated terminal kinda sucks. It might not be better from a security perspective but it’s much better from a user experience perspective and that matters more to me personally.
The said I still use flatpak as well, and prefer to use flatpak if there isn’t a material difference in functionality between the snap and flatpak.
NVIDIA Optimus support - out of the box with a UI to switch graphics cards. The only other bistro I have seen to support it is Ubuntu MATE. All other distros require installation outside of the default package managers.
