I got in a silly mood again and decided to mess around again with Linux. That can only lead to trouble!
This time I decided to swap out of Linux Mint and try Pop_OS, a distro made by System76, a company that sells PC hardware with the OS pre-installed, so you know they’re committed!
I made a boo boo when removing Mint. The proper order is:
- Remove the GRUB bootloader that gives you a menu to choose Mint or Windows when restarting the PC
- Remove or format the Linux partition (in this case, a separate SSD)
I did this in the reverse order, which meant I had to do a bunch of other stuff to fix things. Thank you, internet, for still being at least useful enough to provide the steps to take!
Once I had Linux Mint gone, I booted from the Pop_OS USB stick and the installation went fine-ish. I would keep getting “Pop_OS has stopped working” pop-ups during the process and would have to wait before I could click them away. They would often come back multiple times, but in the end it was annoying and didn’t kill the process or anything.
I’m typing on Pop_OS now!
Why did I switch? A few reasons, but mostly to try something different as a point of comparison, and also because Pop_OS is different. Mint follows a lot of Windows conventions, for better or for worse, where Pop_OS does things a little differently with its UI. It’s maybe a bit more Mac-like, but not really Mac-like. It’s more its own thing, and I like that they are trying something a little different.
Now, the scary part: I haven’t rebooted to see what happens. In theory, I should get a menu and be able to choose Windows or Pop_OS. If that doesn’t happen, I may need to do the old bootrec.exe /fixmbr again, or other trickery to get Windows to load, because as nice as Pop_OS might be (I perhaps have a few more reservations than initially), it ain’t gonna replace Windows. Not yet, anyway.
In my next Linux update, I’ll talk a bit about new apps I’m testing to replace some of the Windows and Mac apps I regularly use. Fun! Sort of!
