A while back, I started trying to get more involved with the Linux community again. Back in the day, I was a developer for Arch Linux but, somewhere along the way, I burned out and left the community almost entirely. I’ve always maintained at least one Linux machine but dropped out of the public eye for quite a while. Granted, I didn’t abandon the open-source community; I still contributed heavily to the WordPress community and had my hand in a few other open-source projects, but Linux fell to the wayside. As I started working towards bus life, I realized how much of that I could easily control through a few custom Linux systems and decided it was time to rekindle my love affair with Linux. But… I didn’t want to go straight back to Arch. Arch always has, and always will have, a special place in my heart. I spent a long time building relationships in that community and learned a ton along the way. This time, however, I wanted something that just worked.

Building an infrastructure to control what will be, in effect, my home requires a degree of stability that Arch doesn’t always possess. No matter how stable my Arch installs were, there was frequently a degree of uncertainty in doing major upgrades, particularly after long periods of inactivity. I never once ran into a situation I couldn’t find my way out of, but there were a few times that I had to get my hands dirty to get things running smoothly again. A bus introduces a particular set of challenges, including the very likely possibility that I could find myself off-grid for extended periods. Sure, I could run upgrades over a cell connection, but that’s hardly ideal.

In my search for optimized hardware for those mission-critical systems, I stumbled across System76. System76 is a hardware manufacturer that specializes in Linux-based systems. They started out building around Ubuntu but, somewhere along the way, decided they wanted a bit more control over the system. They wanted their system to pop. Thus, Pop!_OS was born!

If I had to describe Pop!_OS in one sentence, it would be “Ubuntu done right.” The Pop!_OS team has put a ton of effort into making their distro the streamlined, user-friendly, efficient system that we all know and love, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. Since I always try to give back, I looked for ways to help out the community and realized that there wasn’t a great resource for a community (Reddit is great and all, but come on), and there wasn’t a great documentation system available yet. Those are problems I knew how to solve! Hence, Pop!_Planet was born. With the help and support of various users from the Pop!_OS community, as well as System76 engineers, I’m hoping to build the definitive Pop!_OS community resource.