Left Windows for Pop!OS on a whim. Mostly happy, but a few things are rough
About 3 weeks ago, I made a pretty spontaneous decision to ditch Windows and install Pop!_OS in one big rush. At first I was honestly really impressed: it felt fast, looked great, and for the most part everything just worked.
I didn’t do a ton of research beforehand. I’m a pretty low-power user, mostly web apps, a bit of Steam gaming, and I basically wanted off Windows immediately. So the choice was more gut feeling than a carefully planned decision.
Now that I’ve settled in a bit and made things feel more “homey,” I’m starting to notice some rough edges, and I wanted to ask how people here would approach them:
1. Nvidia issues (RTX 3060 desktop)
The system was randomly freezing from time to time, or at least the UI was. The issue was very likely an unstable combination of NVIDIA + Pop!_OS + COSMIC + Wayland, together with my system’s PCIe link / power management. It kept throwing Xid 79: GPU has fallen off the bus.
Things got more stable after switching from the open NVIDIA driver to the proprietary one, disabling GSP, and most importantly changing the GFX lane speed in BIOS from GEN5 to GEN3. The main thing I learned is that the PCIe link does scale up properly under load, so it seems more like a problem with power / display / driver transitions than totally dead hardware. Right now it seems mostly stable.
2. Clipboard history
One Windows workflow I really miss is Win+Shift+S, then later pasting from Win+V. More generally, I miss the Windows clipboard history a lot, especially the little menu near the cursor where you can choose what to paste.
I solved the screenshot part with Flameshot, but what’s the best Linux equivalent for an actual Windows-style clipboard history with a popup menu?
3. Network drives / NAS workflow
On Windows, all my data lived on my NAS and I mounted the SMB shares as drives. My desktop was basically acting like a thin client, and I worked directly on the shares. That also made it really easy to wipe Windows and switch over quickly.
On Pop!_OS, I haven’t really found a good replacement for that workflow yet. Right now I can open my network shares through Gigolo, but they don’t really feel like they’re properly available to applications. I can’t even just double-click an MP3 and play it. I usually have to copy files to the desktop first.
What’s the “right” way on Linux if you want to work mostly or entirely off remote SMB shares?
4. Remote desktop
I haven’t dug into this yet, but I’d like to access my Pop!_OS desktop remotely from my Windows machine. On Windows, the built-in RDP client made that super easy.
Problem is: I can’t install software on the Windows machine because it’s a work laptop. So what would be the best option here?
5. MS Word / Excel
So far I’ve kind of ignored this issue. I still have an Office 365 subscription, and maybe I’ll move to open-source alternatives eventually, but for the transition period, and for compatibility reasons, I’d prefer to keep using the real Windows versions.
Since gaming works surprisingly well on Linux, is there also a decent way to run Word and Excel via Wine or something similar?
6. Reinstall / restoring my setup
What I liked about Windows was that my setup was easy to rebuild: install Windows, sign into my Microsoft account, sync OneDrive, reconnect my NAS shares, done.
Now that I’m customizing Pop!_OS more, I’m a bit worried about reinstalling later or moving to another machine. I don’t want to lose all my tweaks, apps, configs, etc. and spend ages rebuilding everything manually.
My ideal setup would be: once I have Pop!_OS configured the way I like it, I back that state up to my NAS and can restore it fairly quickly later. I’ve read that Flatpak has some kind of export option. Is there an established Linux workflow for this kind of thing?
7. COSMIC growing pains
Aside from the clipboard and network drive issues, I’m actually okay with the rest. I’m even looking forward to future updates and I’m fine waiting a few weeks or months for things to improve. I don’t feel like I need to distro-hop immediately.
That said, COSMIC definitely still feels like it has some way to go. But for where it is right now, I’d still say it’s been pretty okay for me overall.
Would appreciate any thoughts on how you’d approach these points. I’ve been glancing at other distros too, but I kind of suspect the grass won’t really be much greener there.
(translated by AI 1:1 since I'm no native speaker)