UPDATE!
I’ve written this post as a result of my research towards buying a System 76 laptop. If I had purchased one then I would have wanted to run Pop!_OS on as many of the computers here as possible. Last night I made an impulse buy and opted for a different brand which, once it gets delivered will surely get a few blog posts.
I am in the process of buying a new laptop that does NOT come pre-installed with Windows. System 76 is one of the few companies which sell the product I want and in order to learn if Pop!_OS is right for me, I’ve installed it in a VM.
Virtual machines are great for testing and if something works in a VM, it will work when installed on bare metal. The opposite is also true.
Pop OS Python problem
I couldn’t believe that someone so prominent in the Linux community would have me google for how to set up Python. In 2022, I expect Python to just be there and ready to go regardless of the Linux distribution. How ever, there is a fix to get Python working on Pop!_OS.
Here is the Pop OS Python fix
sudo apt install python-is-python3
After that command run, I was finally able to continue and everything worked as expected. What bugs me the most is that there is very little on Google about this Pop OS Python issue and even more so that the creators of Pop!_PS are not aware of this mess. Not good.
Pop!_OS is OK as a daily driver
If I buy a System 76 laptop (not in a rush after today’s experience), I will most likely try and use their operating system as a daily driver for all of my machines. It’s not my favorite because openSUSE Tumbleweed and EndeavourOS are a force to be reckoned with. Fortunately, the software I use doesn’t care much about the underlying operating system and Blender, FreeCAD, Codium, Atom, Firefox and the like run happily on pretty much any Linux distribution.
Pop!_OS is Ubuntu based and about a year ago, I did install Ubuntu because back then it was the only distribution that would scale the desktop in order to make my dual 4K monitors useful. I have since sold them which corrected the problem but kept Gnome as my favorite DE.
Will I continue to use Pop OS for Python programming
Once i installed python-is-python3, the path issues went away but to be sure, I have to do additional testing with Anaconda and a few other development tasks which have to run without much configuration because life is too short to waste on reading outdated google searches from 2011. If I find something else annoying then I will update this post. If not, it serves as my reminder to fix this issue if I actually install Pop OS on one of my workstations.
As stated above, I have decided to go with a Windows laptop and because of the high-end features, it might not be possible to install Linux for a while. Windows 10 Pro does have some VM capability and if it’s any good, I will run ether openSUSE Tumbleweed or more likely EndeavourOS but it depends on what I need. Pop OS is a fine operating system and I will check it out from time to time especially since System 76 has augmented it nicely compared to the way Gnome is implemented in Ubuntu.