[ META ] What is the community's opinion of Pop!_OS?
It’s an Ubuntu downstream maintained by Linux box maker System76 which is targeted for both general usability and design/media applications. They will soon be debuting their own home-spun desktop environment, Cosmic DE, which is highly anticipated by the Linux community.
How does the community here feel about this distribution and the company that has brought it to us? How do you feel about the projects that they’re working on, and their goals for the distribution moving forward?
I never use "derivative" distros. I don't want to run into weird problems and spend hours troubleshooting only to find out they have changed some config file.
I cannot answer your question obviously but there are several “primary” distros.
Debian, Fedora, Arch, Void, Alpine, Chimera, RHEL, SUSE, Gentoo, and others are all built from scratch. You do not have to use SystemV. The closest to that is probably Slackware I guess.
PopOS is based on Ubuntu which is itself based on Debian.