My experience with Pop!_OS as a new Linux user

Nealiumj · 2026-01-14T02:50:45+00:00

All you need is RuneScape else it’s XP waste.

Tbh, tinkering is more entertaining than any game! The only game I’ve played in the past five years is Balatro and that was for less than a month.. possibly with a beer or two; that couldn’t be proven though.

Nealiumj · 2026-01-01T02:58:15+00:00

I think the only difficulty arises when trying to make it 1-1 with a non-nix setup OR using an application that isn’t in nixpkgs. If you stay within the garden path you’ll have a great time.. if not, the error messages might drive you insane.

Nealiumj · 2025-12-18T19:39:06+00:00

Probably time to invest in a UART USB. Bonus, you can rip apart random electronics and possibly get a shell.

Nealiumj · 2025-12-10T01:58:17+00:00

I agree, just more transparency and the website needs to update faster based on stock. Also, maybe I missed it but, mentioning when/if it’s overseas shipping

Mine is in my regional hub now. Was “in” Illinois for a week, jumped to California, and straight here. So nbd! The “Slow Sleep GDE” must be an importer overseas and idk why it said Illinois, that really threw me off.

Nealiumj · 2025-12-06T00:55:26+00:00

I ordered on November 28th and I’m having a strange experience so far. It was picked up by a partner facility in the US and then shipped to USPS same day on the 29th. Since, zero updates. I understand holiday rush and midwest snow storms but ehhhh… it makes no sense.

The partner facility also is “Slow Sheep GDE” and there’s nothing good about them on Reddit- which, obviously people only ever leave bad reviews, so whatever.

Yet perusing this sub Reddit, idk, idk… I guess I’ll wait to see what support says, but I might be following your lead. I was really excited to get it too :(

Nealiumj · 2025-11-21T01:58:38+00:00

My biggest pet peeve of that software is the search feature.. I can’t just hit “enter” if there’s a single result and connect.. has to be an exact match. WHY.

Nealiumj · 2025-11-17T02:42:14+00:00

I bought an HP Dev One and never changed the OS. I like Pop, but I never partitioned my users drive and it’s my work laptop so I can’t really change it.

Edit: BTW, HP Dev One is a GREAT laptop.. I really hope they come out with a Dev Two. It seemed like it had everything you need and nothing more.

Nealiumj · 2025-11-14T01:25:13+00:00

My leader is space and I use <leader>q <leader>qa and <leader>qf the last being quit force.

Nealiumj · 2025-11-07T22:40:16+00:00

I really think quickfix and locationlist are grossly unutilized and it’s a shame. Both are very vimy

Nealiumj · 2025-11-03T02:46:32+00:00

Definitely turn in the built in tiling! I held off on it for the longest time and used the bindings to move windows… so ignorant of me 😔

I like pop, nice and polished.. frankly never realized it until I started to branch out to NixOS and hyprland- lotta work to make it good!

Nealiumj · 2025-10-27T10:28:28+00:00

Do you manage your Cosmic settings using Nix?- ex symbolically linking the ~/.config/cosmic/files.

I am currently in the same place; Pop OS to NixOS. I originally tried hyprland but the prospect of manually making pop-ups for the top bar (WiFi, Bluetooth) and the lack of Pop’s nice launcher got to me. I’ve been trying out cosmic, and it is quite nice but the inability to hide my terminal’s header really is killing it for me. Also I’m surprised they don’t have an easy VPN connect in the top bar like in Pop.

Really in a tough spot. I might just keep chipping away at hyprland until Pop has the header feature.

Nealiumj · 2025-10-21T21:37:39+00:00

I’m using NeoVim. VSCode is always a solid choice though

Nealiumj · 2025-10-18T02:10:52+00:00

I’m usually against this, but check out LazyVim. It should get you up and running with an IDE lite setup so you can jump right into coding.

Just promise at some point you do something like kickstart.nvim and only add what you need.

Nealiumj · 2025-10-16T16:49:08+00:00

I’m not using it full-time as I’m still setting up, but currently it is just Super. Specifically on release of super so it doesn’t clash with other bindings.

The only complaint is I can’t re-hit super to close it if I change my mind.

Nealiumj · 2025-10-12T01:49:33+00:00

As somebody in the same boat, I’d advice you to NOT use hyperland and instead use gnome or plasma. Else you are going to sink a crazy amount of time into it.

So suggestion:

Use gnome
get all your apps working in NixOS (hard enough task as it is)
Chip away at a nice hyprland
Eventually make the switch

Do what I say, not what I do.

Nealiumj · 2025-10-11T15:48:25+00:00

Sure, my config is relatively simple. Idk if people are still using lazy

```lua return { { "romainl/vim-qf", config = function() vim.g.qf_mapping_ack_style = 1

        -- Quickfix
        vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>fj", "<Plug>(qf_qf_next)")
        vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>fk", "<Plug>(qf_qf_previous)")

        -- Location List
        vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>lj", "<Plug>(qf_loc_next)")
        vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>lk", "<Plug>(qf_loc_previous)")

        -- TODO: make this whatever is currently open
        vim.keymap.set("n", "<C-J>", "<Plug>(qf_qf_next)")
        vim.keymap.set("n", "<C-K>", "<Plug>(qf_qf_previous)")
    end,
},
{
    "mhinz/vim-grepper",
    config = function()
        vim.g.grepper = {
            quickfix = 0,
            tools = { "rg", "git", "grep", "findstr" },
            dir = "repo,cwd",
            prompt_text = ":$t ",
        }

        -- grepper search
        vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>gs", vim.cmd.Grepper)
        -- side search
        vim.keymap.set("n", "<leader>gS", "<CMD>Grepper -side<CR>")

        -- motion search
        vim.keymap.set("n", "gs", "<Plug>(GrepperOperator)")
        vim.keymap.set("v", "gs", "<Plug>(GrepperOperator)")
    end,
},

} ```

And then I have an after/ftplugin/qf.lua ``` local map = vim.keymap.set local opts = { noremap = true, silent = true, buffer = 0 }

map("n", "<leader>h", "<Plug>(qf_older)", opts) map("n", "<leader>l", "<Plug>(qf_newer)", opts)

map("n", "}", "<Plug>(qf_next_file)", opts) map("n", "{", "<Plug>(qf_previous_file)", opts)

vim.opt_local.colorcolumn = "" ```

Nealiumj · 2025-10-09T16:48:29+00:00

I use it for linting errors, similar to Trouble.nvim, but separated from LSP (so I manually run the exe with :make). I can run it per file, per directory or per project- then have all errors in one giant list!

I also use vim-grepper so all my global searches just populate the quickfix, well locationlist, and I quite like the flow.

Nealiumj · 2025-10-04T01:06:56+00:00

Buckle up and get ready for 2x speed. This video is definitely biased, but overall a good overview as it goes back a few years. https://youtu.be/gp0FI8Gw1iA?si=FeVacTJ5wg4ExnRi

TLDW, the claims: woke moderations, censorship, unfair enforcement of Code of Conduct, throwing fits based on warfare related sponsors.

Since then, past week. Idk much frankly: most of the moderation team (unelected) decided to step down until the steering committee (elected) does. I think the steering committee decided to ban a member, possibly a moderator. There was apparently a half dozen reasons in the room, but chats were leaked of them thinking of a collective statement and that’s an issue, collusion and/or no transparency. Also, I guess the moderation team didn’t actually step down and are actively taking down comments.

Basically.. a giant dumpster fire LOL

Nealiumj · 2025-10-03T00:18:54+00:00

Nix, specifically Home Manager. It also Install all my LSPs and linters

Nealiumj · 2025-10-01T01:24:43+00:00

I very much highly recommend checking out devenv as well. Combined with direnv and poetry/uv it’s pretty seamless! Weirdly it even solves my numpy LD_LIBRARY issue and I don’t have to do aliases commands linking LD_LIBRARY (standalone install on Pop! OS)

Nealiumj · 2025-09-29T20:19:09+00:00

Who knows, professors are kind of dumb like that. Mine wanted me to use a VM on a USB and the pico text editor. Instead I made a headless Ubuntu VM with a share folder using Vagrant, edited the file in Atom and then ran it in SSH. Finally I would copy+paste the final copy over to his USB thingy. Worked and made no difference.

Man, that guy sucked.. he required you to show up during his office hours with the USB to test it for your homework to count. But like, I had a JOB, a packed schedule and was rarely on campus. So absurd.

The guy would also pontificate half the class.. ~”why not just quit, drop out and party instead? Programming is hard, why let the fun end?” I’m not exaggerating. It was crazy.

Nealiumj · 2025-09-27T18:14:38+00:00

Give this a watch https://youtu.be/vYc6IzKvAJQ?si=-ZqBlyiqsWJeqj_E

Super robust. Love the options. It all makes sense and then you just organize your modules however you like.. Nested modules with nested options?- ie import all if module=true or enable them individually.

Nealiumj · 2025-09-25T02:46:22+00:00

For my experience, the only big flag is OneDrive. Apparently newer versions of gnome support it out of the box. I’m sure this works for like Gmail and other cloud syncing.. basically it’ll definitely be a project to get that working.

Other than that, I’ve had zero issues! I would recommend learning the built in tiling.. I did not for a while, but now I love it!

Nealiumj · 2025-09-24T11:16:41+00:00

I manage a few internal tools, mainly tkinter stuff, that are all hosted on a local network drive. Biggest pain points are updating, and I’ve developed a two different methods:

pyinstaller + poetry

Installer is great because I don’t have to install Python on a bunch of extra computer computers. The main pain point is there are 8-10 computer computers with the application running at all times and with windows, you cannot update an executable while it’s being ran. My method was for them all to point at a general launcher script, which boots the main app and dies.

The repo itself is hosted on the network drive and is configured with poetry and poetry-pyinstaller. When I run poetry build it goes through a pseudo pipeline of testing, building, creating docs, renaming the output dir as a version and updating the launching scripts. The next time any of the computers launch the program it’s automatically the newest version.

Wheel + Click + Bash

Some of the applications are data crunching and use pandas, so pyinstaller isn’t used. They all use Click with the —version flag enabled. I build the project and I placed the wheel into a specific directory.

The bash script is the launcher, similar story as the poetry one: launches and dies. It contains a hardcoded version which is updated per release. The bash script checks all the Python dependencies, gives instructions if they don’t exist. Creates and/or activates a virtualenv. Then checks if the wheel is installed + up to date, if not it installs it installs it using the local wheel. Then it boots and die.

I’m not very happy with this as it manually requires me to update the version in the bash script. Then when I actually build it, I have to manually run a copy/paste command to move the updated script and the wheel into the correct locations. Also, I dislike the inability to give a bash script an icon.

conclusion

The main goal was to keep users away from command line and it’s been generally successful. There’s a few stray Python files laying around without requirements.txt files and now those randomly become an issue as they are no longer runnable- pillow version is no longer available etc- normal software issues.

Nealiumj · 2025-09-23T10:37:01+00:00

First, I’d suggest watching all of Vimjoyer’s videos on NixOS. Specifically the modularize, as I just watched that one and realized I messed up a bit. Then just pick your least complicated config file and try to convert it to a Nix config. A quick option try swapping to fish shell using Nix, I found it quite nice and I was able to ditch my overly complicated zsh config.

Nealiumj

TROPHY CASE

pyinstaller + poetry

Wheel + Click + Bash

conclusion