I started my journey away from Windows with Pop back in May 2020 (last screenshot) and switched to Arch after 6 months to get more familiar with Linux. Faced challenges and learned a lot. Now, as a professional 3D artist, I return to Pop OS for stability—full circle after 3 years!

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on /r/pop_os

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  • flat-remix-gnome

    Flat Remix is a GNOME Shell theme inspired by material design. It is mostly flat using a colorful palette with some shadows, highlights, and gradients for some depth.

    Thank you! If you only want to make your existing top bar transparent and floating, I recommend you use this extension for transparency. Then, to make it "floating", I use this shell theme— scroll down a little to find installation instructions, but bear in mind it may not be compatible with the COSMIC shell; if you see any breakage, you may want to deactivate it from your Extensions app to have your vanilla Gnome Shell instead. I guess what the theme does is make part of the bar invisible with some CSS so it appears to be floating, so you probably could do the same by editing some files without having to install the whole theme; I'm no programmer so I can't help there.

  • candy-icons

    :lollipop: Sweet gradient icons

    The GTK (Applications theme) and Shell theme are the Flat Remix theme by Daniruiz. The icon theme is Candy Icons by EliverLara. If you want to set it up exactly like mine, your Tweaks application setting should look like this.

  • WorkOS

    The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  • blur-my-shell

    Extension that adds a blur look to different parts of the GNOME Shell, including the top panel, dash and overview

    In my case, I'm using the Blur My Shell extension, so it basically takes whatever background image I have and places it in the overview with a blur effect (though you can also remove the blur completely and just use the extension to set your background as your overview background). By default it will blur a lot of things around your desktop, like the top bar, for instance— just disable anything you don't want; I personally only leave the Overview blur active.

  • instant-meshes

    Interactive field-aligned mesh generator

    There are other useful things available on Linux too— I use Substance 3D Painter from Steam for texturing, Krita for concept art and retouching, and this neat little tool for retopology. Again, nothing you can't get on Windows too, but it's so you know what you count with. You get a stable and reliable OS, full desktop customization to make it fit your own workflow, and a cool community in exchange. Whether that much is worth the tradeoffs depends on you.

  • flat-remix-gtk

    Flat Remix is a GTK application theme inspired by material design. It is mostly flat using a colorful palette with some shadows, highlights, and gradients for some depth.

    You're right! Here's the GTK.

  • bevy

    A refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust

    As for game engines, in my experience both the Godot Engine (2D and 3D) and the Unreal Engine work like a charm on Linux, so you may want to consider giving those a chance too. Unreal can be quite steep, but Godot is really powerful and a much smoother learning process than Unity, in my 100% biased opinion. I’ve been experimenting with Bevy too—an emerging game engine with support for 2D and 3D rendering written in the Rust programming language—so far so cool.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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