I wrote earlier about the alpha release of Pop!_OS, with its new Rust-based desktop environment written from scratch. I’d installed it into a virtual machine via QEMU/KVM on my Linux Mint daily driver system. It worked, at least for an alpha. Every time I’d start it up I’d pick up any updates, reboot the VM, and then try out various features to see what state they were in. This morning I started up the Pop!_OS environment and attempted to perform an upgrade, and I noticed a rather hard failure with the keyboard.
In order to update from the command line I would type sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y. The special characters being the ‘&&’ characters between the apt commands. This morning I could not type those characters. Those characters are on the ‘7’ numeric key, and are accessed with the shift key. In other words, Pop!_OS suddenly stopped handling the shift key. I don’t know how or why, but any shifted keyboard character was ignored, only showing the unshifted keyboard character in the terminal.
I though about that for a few minutes and then made the decision to delete the VM. I have no idea how long it will be before Pop!_OS hits a release candidate stage, but I won’t be holding my breath. There are already many excellent Linux distributions to choose from such that another entrant had better have a powerful reason to be noticed, let alone used. At this rate of progress I don’t ever see that happening with Pop!_OS.
Radarwitch