System76, the hardware vendors that sell Ubuntu PCs, has announced their own Linux distribution called Pop!_OS.

Pop!_OS is based on Ubuntu and uses the Gnome stack + customized themes and extensions. An alpha version of the distribution is available for testing, and the final release is expected in October. At the moment it seems like a customized version of Gnome, but it’s expected that System76 will be doing more tweaking and fine tuning of the distribution to offer a more polished, out-of-the-box experience on their hardware.

The distro seems to be a response to the recent Canonical decision to stop pursuing the consumer PC segment and focus purely on enterprise. The company stopped its in-house desktop project Unity and laid off engineers who were working on those projects. The company decided to go back to the stock Gnome Shell experience. Since stock Ubuntu offers a very vanilla Gnome experience, System76 wants to offer an experience that they think is well suited for their customers.

In an interview, System76 Community Manager Ryan Sipes told us that the inspiration behind Pop!_OS reflects where the company has been heading for a while.

“We receive a lot of great customer feedback and are really attuned to our customers’ needs. We've been focusing our engineering effort on helping our customers achieve more and have a fantastic computer experience. This desire to create the best machines for our customers has driven our recent moves into manufacturing, and those same goals are also behind tailoring a beautiful software experience that is Pop!_OS. Our customers are creators: engineers, developers, 3D modelers, and makers. The work that goes into Pop!_OS will serve them and their needs,” said Sipes.

System76 is also planning on bringing hardware design and manufacturing in-house, which aligns very well with the plans to work on their own distribution to offer an Apple-like seamless integration between hardware and software.

You can download alpha of Pop!_OS from their download page.