Note: I am not from the Pop team so this has nothing to do with them. I am just a user who wants shit to work and not distro hop every couple of months.
Not trying to invoke a distro war here, but I recently bought a second hand sys76 laptop. The build is ok not fantastic like thinkpads or macs, but i wanted to try out their distro - Pop OS. It runs pretty great, smooth and very snappy. I really like the best of both worlds - tiling vs floating windows.
That said, I see a lot of hate for this distro. Christ Tirus Tech posted multiple videos ditching this OS like it is garbage. Linus Tech Tips had that self owned moment when he installed Pop and crashed it, so not a good marketing for the OS.
I used Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, Arch. Each has its pros and cons but the hostility is nowhere near the ones Pop gets. Did the devs fucked up because they did something stupid to the OS, like Manjaro team when they forgot to renew security certificates?
People (especially tech influencers) tend to hate beginner-friendly OSes.
I’ve been using Pop for 3+ years on my main rig. Especially with COSMIC, it is fantastic.
Sure, I’ve got Arch on a laptop, and I dabble with other distros periodically. Pop stays on the main rig though. Why? Because I don’t want to update something with a bleeding edge package and break my system. Whatever time I would be spending doing something fun in my off time would then be spent fixing Arch, instead of doing the thing.
Now, back to the influencers: why do they hate Pop / Mint / Ubuntu? Tbh I think there’s just a certain amount of flexing they have to do as influencers, and it’s hard to flex when everything just works.