Week of October 30th, 2017

Happy November, everyone! Another fun week has passed us by here in Denver. I’ve been busy adjusting to the weird climate changes. It’s like this area has mood swings that we all constantly have to adjust to!

Enough about me - let’s talk Pop!..shop! See what I did there? Never mind, moving right along.

Some exciting news this week for Pop!

Scaling Pop!_OS Development - re-organizing for the future

Doing the same things better, faster, and more reliable is the name of the game. We are pivoting towards improving the entire development process on Pop!_OS. We are making changes in how we triage issues from the community. We are also streamlining our Q&A process as well now that we have Benjamin Shpurker, our dedicated QA, onboard. But that’s not all - we have started locking down our staging and production code with specific requirements that need to be met before being merged into their respective repositories. Code reviews and testing are incredibly important to us. The team has done a great job thus far, but we want to build a process that will scale while boosting quality and reliability.

Building and Growing a Pop Community

Plans are also afoot to build and grow the community around Pop!_OS and create a sustaining environment for our users to build relationships with each other and provide the feedback that will help improve Pop!_OS for our customers. If you’d like to be involved with the community, reach out to us: http://chat.pop-os.org/. We solicit feedback directly from this community. It was through this channel that we were able to determine which apps to feature in Pop!_OS.



HiDPI Features

I wanted to talk about a feature that will be maturing sometime in the near future. Our engineer, David has been working on improving HiDPI. While others in the desktop community are focused on Wayland, David has been working on improving HiDPI experience on X, especially if you have an Nvidia video card. When completed, you’ll be able to have a uniform experience when connecting low DPI monitors into HiDPI enabled laptops in the X session. What does that mean? It means that when you plug in your monitor the right thing will happen. We are planning a rolling implementation, meaning that we would introduce these features over time. We hope to show progress on this feature over the next few weeks. So watch this space.

Upstream

Our UX architect, Cassidy will be attending GNOME’s User Experience hackfest in London working with GNOME designers on the GNOME default user experience. This will be our opportunity to meet GNOME designers face to face and establish a familial relationship with upstream.



Pop!_OS Release Party

Last week was our local Pop! release party where we had over a hundred RSVPs. A record for us with many new faces. Attendees were able to try out Pop!_OS on our systems, mingle with each other, and be able to provide immediate feedback on what they thought of Pop!_OS. The evening was marked with spirited discussions on Linux, distributions, and of course Pop!_OS was in the center of it all. It was a fabulous night for all of us with overwhelming positive feedback for the work that we’ve done so far on Pop!_OS. Included are some pictures from the event.

And that’s the way it was, Nov 3, 2017, see you next week, Pop! fans!