With Ubuntu, Windows, OSMC, Risc OS, Gentoo and FreeBSD (not to mention Raspberry Pi OS), the Raspberry Pi 4 is bubbling over with operating systems competing for your Micro SD cards. The list potentially grows one longer this week, with the discovery by It’s FOSS of a port of System 76’s Pop!_OS for the device.
The scent of a Raspberry Pi port can be traced to Twitter, where System76’s Principal Engineer and Pop!_OS maintainer Jeremy Soller recently posted a photo showing the 64 bit OS apparently running on a stock Raspberry Pi 400. More tellingly, he also shared a link to a repository full of Pop!_OS packages for ARM devices.
For those not already familiar, Pop!_OS is an Ubuntu-based OS that’s free and open-source, with a custom Gnome desktop known as COSMIC. It’s maintained by System76, a computer builder operating out of Denver, Colorado, that sells laptops, desktops and servers, all with either Pop!_OS or Ubuntu installed. They’re quite keen on Linux there, it could be said.
Pop!_OS is notable for its support of AMD and Nvidia GPUs with no additional tinkering, and its auto-tiling desktop, which fills your display with app windows. A tabbed, web-browser-like, look is also available, along with a complete set of keyboard shortcuts to move windows around. It has a 7.5% share of all Steam installations on Linux, according to the Steam Hardware Survey.
There has been no announcement of a timescale, or anything else for that matter. The latest version of Pop!_OS is based on Ubuntu 21.04, which we know runs very nicely on a Pi, but there's a new version, 21.10 Impish Indri, due on October 14th. The repository linked to by Soller mentions Impish in its directory path, so we could see something within a matter of weeks.
