Greetings, Pop!_OS Fans! Welcome back to another fun rendition of the Pop!_OS blog. We have some major updates for you in regards to our many engineering projects. We’ve also been out and about in the community, and we have some upcoming engagements to talk about.

Installer

As mentioned before, we’ve been partnering with elementary on the installer work: they address the front-end while we focus on the back-end. We’ve made progress with porting our existing installer content into a new side-by-side layout which will allow illustrations, an on-going project by our designer Kate, which we have previously showcased. You can also find more of information on the elementary side of this project in a blog post by Daniel Foré.

On the backend, engineering has built-in support for LVM and LVM on LUKS-based installs, with password and keyfile-based LUKS configurations, in distinst. Testing continues for fully-encrypted whole disk installs.

HiDPI

We are getting ready to release major updates to the HiDPI daemon for all System76 customers. The new release will include a new and improved layout engine, the ability to use saved layouts and resolutions, and several bug fixes. We are also working toward making the HiDPI daemon available in Pop!_OS and elsewhere. If you are interested in seeing HiDPI in action, please come see our booth at Scale! (More on that later…)

Community Engagement

We’ve been out and about in the community! Cassidy, our UX Architect, was recently on “Linux Unplugged” talking about our installer, specifically, the full disk encryption work. Having full disk encryption as the default encryption has been met with generally positive feedback! The cohesion of UX work and backend engineering will continue to present a fun and interesting challenge. You can hear the whole story at Jupiter Broadasting.



In other community news, we were at Lonestar ElixirConf this past weekend where Ben, our Infra-Structural Engineer, gave a presentation on his experience working with elixir for our customer support webapp, Joshua. Being platinum sponsors of this year’s event, I even had the opportunity to speak for five minutes before the opening keynote. Ben and Blake (our new front-end web developer) had a great time interacting with attendees and discussing shared experiences in that way that’s only possible at conferences. I manned the booth and took immense pleasure in talking up Pop!_OS. After all, talking is what I do! :-) Most of my messaging centered on Pop!_OS being a developer-centric operating system, and it was worth giving it a test drive; the conference itself primarily consisted of Macbooks running MacOS, but some of my conversations resonated with attendees, given recent changes in MacOS.

Next up is SCALE 16x, one of the conferences at which we have our largest presence. I’ll be giving the opening keynote at the Ubucon track at Scale as well as presenting on how we came to start Pop!_OS! We’re also planning a showcase of the HiDPI daemon so we can show off its capability with a 4-monitor wall consisting of different monitor types. Plus, we’ll have a large booth to demo gaming on a Leopard that’s running Pop!_OS, a display of our two flashship laptops, and the added bonuses of Pop!_Corn and a penguin! Stop by and see us!

New Team Addition!

Finally, it is my distinct pleasure to introduce May, our new Procurement Manager! May’s job will be to negotiate and acquire materials for the exciting new direction we are taking in manufacturing desktops and laptops at System76! She loves spicy food and is excited to join us here in Denver as we move into this new phase.

That’s all for this week. As usual, if you have questions or feedback, join us on our chat channel or post on our subreddit–– and if you’ve found a bug, file it. See you next time, same Pop! time, same Pop! channel!