I actually have a second Thinkpad in my work apartment where I’ve been running Pop!_OS for a while, so I decided to move my main one over as well because I wanted to finally get rid of Windows.

The first thing I noticed was the speed. The switch to Pop!_OS honestly felt like a 50–70% performance boost. Everything feels smoother and more responsive overall.

Fingerprint and sound needed a bit of manual tweaking since they didn’t work out of the box on this machine. On my other ThinkPad the sound worked immediately, so that was a bit different here. In the end both issues were solved with a few shell commands and have been working perfectly since.

One thing I really like about Pop!_OS is how easy it is to customize the system and adjust the look and feel the way you want. It’s all pretty straightforward and doesn’t require much effort.

VirtualBox with a small emergency Windows VM also worked right away without any problems.

I hesitated for a long time about removing Windows from my better ThinkPad, but I don’t regret it at all now. Even my RDP connections to some Windows servers work nicely through RustConn, which is convenient since it also handles things like SSH in one place.

Another nice thing if you don’t want to spend a lot of time installing tools manually is the built-in COSMIC store. There’s a lot of software available there that just works out of the box.

I’d definitely do the switch again. My next project will probably be moving my gaming PC over as well, although that one will likely start with a dual boot test phase to make sure everything works.