I’ve installed Pop!_OS on many machines over the years, and my standard process is:
Install PopOS
rare for PopOS, but, depending on specialized hardware (some legacy Nvidia cards), a little driver rejiggering might be called for. Or a weird network printer setup that CUPS doesn’t like.
set up my custom zsh/bash profile for the terminal
enable firewall
configure SSH and whichever remote management tools I need (I happen to deploy remote machines frequently)
sudo apt install gnome-tweaks & a few other UI tweaking tools (obviously, this step will no longer exist soon)
tweak UI/UX
search through gnome extensions website for extension I want to install. There’s usually a Top 10 or Top 20 gnome extensions list you can google (eg: “best gnome extensions 2024”)
make sure I have all appropriate media codecs installed and updated.
set up pip-/pip3-installer.
After that, it’s setting up/configuring whatever software that particular machine needs.
Edit: there’s probably a lot that I’ve skipped/missed, and a lot that others will do along their way through these steps. This is just a basic outline of some of my post-install processes (developed over time), and I hope this answers your question.
Also, you can google for post-install guides for Ubuntu and they’ll largely be applicable to PopOS since it’s based on Ubuntu.
So I've been planning to install pop on my home computer for my parents to use. They don't know their way around a terminal, so will updating on the GUI store be enough. Or do they occasionally need to run apt update as well