It's fedora instead of debian, but uses a very tuned version of gnome. I personally didn't like a few things, I'm a debian man, I love the simplicity and stability. The older I get, the more I appreciate spartan things.
Technically, yeah. However, Pop isn't their product, their hardware is.
They do their absolute best to create great software like coreboot and Pop and keep it all truly open source. They also innovate the space with things like COSMIC DE (which imo is phenomenal already, even in its early alpha state).
They only offer software support and help for customers of their hardware but that seems reasonable to me. The community is big and helpful so it makes sense for S76 to refer non-customers there.
I've been using Pop as a daily driver for more than 3 years now and a few months ago, I started to think about switching. Until recently, it was stuck on 22.04 with no clear indicator as to when 24.04 would be released. I decide that I was gonna wait for October and if i still felt that way, I was gonna switch. As of today, I haven't switched and since the first alpha release of COSMIC and the recent alpha release of Pop 24.04, I've never even thought about it.
24.04 is fast, stable and works incredibly well with COSMIC. COSMIC is insane for productivity and has fixed almost all UX gripes I've ever had with GNOME and KDE. It's truly amazing and a must-try imo.
Personally I have no issues with a corporate backed distro. My point is that if someone doesn't want a corporate owned distro, PopOS doesn't fit the bill.
Well, yeah. If your requirement is "no corporate", then Pop doesn't fit. However, if you don't want to use Ubuntu because it's a product of Canonical, I would still go ahead and recommend Pop, since it's A) not by Canonical and B) a wholly different kind of corporate backing