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I haven't used Pop!_OS and am not sure how different their riff on the GNOME desktop is - it seems fairly extensively different - but yeah anything GNOME-based is not going to be particularly widget-friendly. The nice thing is that you should be able to install multiple desktop environments side by side and simply select which one you want on the login screen, making it easy to "shop around" for a DE you like. I think KDE Plasma supports widgets, again I haven't used it in ages but it's the default DE when you boot a Steam Deck into desktop mode, so that's a decent indicator that it's not flaming garbage.

Pop!_OS might also be in the process of getting written to be less GNOME-dependent, I heard its devs were looking to go a different path a while back and they're writing a new DE that will eventually become the new Cosmic.

UI scaling as well as monitor quirks might get better when your distro switches to using the Wayland desktop display system, from the ancient and decaying X11 display server which stopped getting improvements years ago. Wayland support might be part of the Cosmic overhaul plans.

Flatpak is another way of installing packages on the system that is supposed to be better in a lot of ways but my experience with it so far is that it's a whole separate package infrastructure that takes up extra space on my root partition. It provides sandboxing capabilities and package updates and installs go pretty quickly though, so it's not without its benefits. As I'm an old man Linux user I just stick with my system package manager for installing stuff. I do like the idea of a future where package installation isn't tied to distro choice, and seeing all the stuff offered on Flathub is nice, but roughly competitive to with the AUR, hence why I still install with pacman/yay whenever possible.

Proton does indeed whip ass. I haven't booted into Windows to play a Windows game in years.

I remember when Linux systems had the most aggressive customization out of every OS, even in the for-babies distros like Ubuntu, but on this thing you don't even get desktop widgets?

From what I remember about Pop OS is that it's supposed to be a hassle-free installation process for less tech savvy users. Its a for-babies distro that see Ubuntu as a daunting challenge, and Ubuntu is supposed to be programmer's first Linux. I am not surprised to hear that it has customization under lock down.

for the monitor wake thing, unfortunately the exact combination of

• what graphics card you have
• which drivers you're using for them (both NV and AMD have 2 separate Linux drivers)
• what exact monitor you have

are important. probably also what power save settings you have, and which DE (though the latter can be derived from the fact you're using Pop!)

Sincerely,
Linux guy with graphics driver experience

If you're going to give me light and dark mode for god's sake let me auto-switch between them at dawn/dusk, that's what light and dark mode is for imo.

if you're using gnome, there's an extension to do that! it's called night theme switcher. you can set it to automatically switch between light and dark theme at dawn and dusk. i've been using it for the better part of a year, and it's been working well.

Keep an eye on the system updates, at a certain point my install stopped getting them and it doesn't want to upgrade. I guess I just gotta start fresh every year...

• flatpak is like snap under Ubuntu except it's not shit. I feel like it's the least awful of the various cross-platform sandboxing app packaging toolkits. there's some apps that are only packaged that way, but the majority of stuff under Pop!OS you can install via apt instead, like usual
• you should be able to scale the UI in the display settings. I was running Pop for a while on a 1440p display and I had it scaled to 125% since I am old and my eyes are not great
• most of what you're annoyed with is due to Pop being based on the GNOME desktop, but they're working on a new UI thing called COSMIC which is likely to be even more locked-down for end-users, since the whole reason Pop!OS exists is so that System76 can sell PC hardware with an OS that's easier to use, that comes encrypted out of the box, has a recovery partition that won't blow away your files if you restore the OS, etc
• however, it's a bit schizophrenic in that it's also being used by some very hardcore Linux-heads at the company, and that's why it's got that tiling display manager thing going, so their devs can use giant 4k displays that end up partitioned into four 1080p sections. I hated it and never used it
• I have no idea why your system isn't waking properly. you might consider reaching out on their chat system for Pop!OS users that aren't running it on System76 hardware, since the company's tech support line is only for actual hardware customers. there's both users and company employees there and you might get useful suggestions. or you might not, it's a bit of a crapshoot like anything open source

most of my experience with pop os is hearing from my friend about it breaking in baffling ways all the time. all i could ever suggest was "probably switch distro". i think a couple other distros are better but still not good. i've only really had a passable experience with endeavour os and a good experience with manually installing arch linux.

you might want to look into different desktop environments, i'm pretty sure there's a lot more customizability in kde for example.

you might be looking in the wrong place for desktop widgets. the taskbar on both xfce and kde (and probably other desktops i havent used) don't work like windows. you can put it wherever you want, make more, put them wherever you want, etc. you should be able to just make a new taskbar, put a clock on it, and throw it in the middle of the screen.

if you don't want to look at a bunch of desktops, honestly just pick kde. it's probably more customizable and featureful than you need, it has both a xorg and wayland version you can switch between to see what works, and it doesn't have a lot of the baffling issues common in other desktops i've seen.

technically sway is the most reliable "desktop" if you set it up properly but it's minimalist nerd shit

i have never used a flatpak, snap, or appimage and i probably never will, they're a whole extra set of nonsense with brand new and improved hair pulling problems and i can't find any benefits

I’ll take the bait here and link this Winamp-era feeling GTK theme site: https://www.gnome-look.org/browse?cat=135

(not sure if this if on-topic, but) honestly i never really get the "year of the linux desktop" thing. changing something as big as an OS is hard. no matter how good linux gets there will always be difficulty barriers, difficulty getting used to something, technical issues, etc. even if linux is actually "superior", most people would rather do nothing than to spend time getting through these barriers.