Red Hat Enterprise Linux vs Pop!_OS

Each released version of RHEL is supported for around ten years by Red Hat with constant bug fixes and security updates.

RHEL favours stability over being up-to date. For this reason it ships with packages that may be up to two years behind in order to ensure stability over everything else.

Using older versions for packages means that they have been thoroughly tested and used in production for quite some time, and are ensured to play well with each-other.

This strategy has paid off quite a lot in the past. One example is the Heartbleed bug which left RHEL unaffected since it was using a two-year old OpenSSL library which did not have the bug.

RHEL has several built-in solutions for disaster recovery. For example, it comes with pacemaker which can be configured to manage multi-site and and stretch clusters across multiple geographical locations for disaster recovery and scalability. It can also be configured to trigger notifications when the status of a managed cluster changes by using enhanced pacemaker alerts.

Since RHEL backports all updates and bug fixes to older versions in order to maintain package compatibility across releases, applications hosted on Red Hat Linux don't have to worry about potential breaking changes in libraries they use, especially language libraries.

This distro is by far the one with the largest number of certified server-class hardware.

Comes with built-in management tools for containers (Atomic CLI, Cockpit) and a container runtime in the form of Docker engine.

If you're a fan of flat desktop interfaces reminiscent of Material design on Android, you'll like the theme that comes as a default in Pop! OS. The desktop and title bars all use a bright turquoise theme that makes the interface feel happy and borderline retro-chic. I found it to be like something you'd find printed on a ringer t-shirt.

The visually appealing and easy to use installer makes dual booting as easy as it can be.

Has nice gnome theme looks really good.

If you still miss how easy it was to just click-install and play games in Windows, Pop! will give you that similar expectation.

Most linux distros seem to hate Nvidia's graphics cards e.g. Fedora and OpenSUSE. System76 have decided to be kind. They have decided to form a good relationship with Nvidia fans and Nvidia itself. By creating a separate installation media that is dedicated for providing support to Nvidia's graphics cards. Even going as far as putting Nvidia's driver updates on Pop!_Shop for users to easily access and install.

Whereas normally, to use a brand new computer with a Linux OS, you would typically try to use unstable and sometimes buggy drivers - or struggle without hardware support until a stable release comes along.

System76 is a hardware company. It configures machines to ship with Linux pre-installed. This means its entire business model centers around delivering a quality desktop Linux experience.

As a result, the company pours more attention onto the desktop. It can fix visual issues and may be able to provide a smoother overall experience than you would have installing a different version of Linux on your machine yourself. Providing Pop!_OS also empowers System76 to make certain fixes for users directly rather than having to coordinate with Canonical or the broader Ubuntu community.