Last week System76 released the Pop!_OS 24.04 beta along with the beta COSMIC desktop. This long overdue update to Pop!_OS re-bases against the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS base while featuring their modern, Rust-based desktop environment. For those curious I ran some benchmarks of Pop!_OS 24.04 beta compared to the current Pop!_OS 22.04 stable release.
Going from Pop!_OS 22.04 to Pop!_OS 24.04 is most notable for now featuring their in-house COSMIC desktop environment built atop Rust, Wayland, and other modern technologies. Pop!_OS 24.04 beta with COSMIC has been working out well in my testing over the past week.
Underneath, the upgrade from Pop!_OS 22.04 to 24.04 isn’t impactful from a kernel perspective with System76 continuing to push down new kernel versions to Pop!_OS 22.04. With my fresh installs the past week of both 22.04 and 24.04 beta, they were both on the Linux 6.16 kernel. The Mesa graphics drivers were also the same as derived from Mesa 25.1.5.
There are some pronounced software differences though with the move from the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to 24.04 LTS package base. The default compiler goes from GCC 11.4 to GCC 13.3 now on Pop!_OS 24.04 beta. There are also other upgrades like OpenJDK 21 as the default Java version and springing ahead from Python 3.10 to Python 3.13 with this forthcoming Pop!_OS release.
For getting an idea of the performance difference from Pop!_OS 22.04 to Pop!_OS 24.04 beta, I ran some benchmarks on the System76 Thelio Major powered by AMD Ryzen Threadripper. The System76 Thelio Major desktop/workstation was configured with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7980X, 4 x 32GB DDR5-4800 memory, 1TB Crucial CT1000T700SSD5 NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX 6700 XT graphics.
Clean installs of both Pop!_OS 22.04 and Pop!_OS 24.04 beta were carried out on the same hardware in looking at the performance differences from the newer compiler and other version upgrades found from this Pop!_OS upgrade.
