I’m on PopOS and my experience is the exact opposite. I love the UI- it’s the main thing I like about it actually. Never had an update fail.
I don’t use gamescope, just run everything from Steam or Heroic and never had an issue gaming.
YMMV
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Even if your audio or WiFi card doesn’t work automatically in the live environment, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are out of luck either. My WiFi card manufacturer doesn’t support Linux (Last thing I buy from them), but I was able to find a driver that was built by the community for a very similar product that works flawlessly.
This may be more complex than some people are willing/able to solve, just wanted to put that out there for people who can so they aren’t discouraged by a bad experience with a live distro.
I just looked it up and people are saying you can install the Ubuntu PPA with no issues.
It may not be (probably isn’t) the latest release, but that option exists at least. I’m glad I never had to use it. What games have you had to use it for? Do you have an AMD GPU or Nvidia?
I just wanted people to know that not everyone thinks Pop-os is shit. Part of the issues you experienced may have been due to the fact that they are currently hard at work writing their own DE (Cosmic) using Rust and they are waiting on that to be finished before upgrading to the newest LTS release of Ubuntu. We are currently still on 22.04.
If you want all of your software packages to be on the bleeding edge, I wouldn’t recommend PopOs. But I definitely would recommend it for someone who just wants a solid distro and doesn’t ‘have a computer science degree’.
YMMV, but from my personal experience using it for almost a year now it’s been rock solid.
Edit: I just realized that my post said “Don’t use gamescope” when what I meant to say was “I don’t use Gamescope.” I wasn’t intending on advising people not to use it. My bad.
Edit2: I also forgot that I stopped using “Pop!_Shop” for updates and software search. That was getting really slow. I would advise your partner install the “COSMIC Store” instead, it’s way better :)