Hello Pop!_OS Fans! It’s that time again and I wanted to reach out to all of you and tell you what an exciting week it has been for the engineering team!

HiDPI

We’ve talked about this for some time, and now it has arrived! Our engineering team has finally released the brand new HiDPI daemon for all System76 laptops and desktops. We expect to ship it for all Pop!_OS users soon. Let’s talk a little bit about the background behind this feature.

Since we started offering laptops with HiDPI screens, we’ve noticed a major challenge to users when HiDPI and LoDPI monitors are used together. We’ve received many support calls from customers on setting up their displays. It was clear we needed a solution today until Wayland matures to the point that it can completely replace X and is supported by all GPU manufacturers.

The new HiDPI service listens for display events and optimizes display settings for the best user experience possible for a variety of multi-monitor setups. The engineering work was no trivial task requiring months of investigative work into the lower levels of the Xorg and GNOME eco-system followed by extensive testing with numerous laptops and desktops with different graphics cards, internal screens, and monitors. We tailored the behavior, so Intel and NVIDIA both do the right thing given their capabilities. The end result is a seamless customer experience of using your applications across a variety of monitors of various resolutions.

You can now plug in a LoDPI external display to your Galago Pro or your HiDPI Oryx, Serval, or Bonobo and expect it to just work. The same is true when plugging a HiDPI display into any other System76 laptop. No more complicated tricks every time you plug a second monitor in.

We also made it simple to switch displays between HiDPI and LoDPI. This is especially useful for applications like GIMP and Inkscape whose toolkits do not support HiDPI and appear very small in HiDPI screens.

Whenever you have a HiDPI monitor, you’ll receive a notification that can be used to toggle between HiDPI crispness and LoDPI compatibility. This notification can be accessed at any time in the message center.

We hope this feature will be of use to all of you as we deliver it to System76 customers and sometime soon as a part of the Pop!_OS experience. We put a lot of work into making the multi-monitor experience as seamless as possible for all our users. If you’re using a HiDPI screen with a System76 laptop or desktop, let us know what you think. Your feedback helps us refine and improve the experience as we prepare to release it for Pop!_OS.

Initial Setup Experience

The work on a new initial setup experience continues apace as we put together an integrated installer with a clear Pop!_OS identity. Included is a page of thumbnail sketches from a story arc that will span the length of the initial setup process.

We’re always looking for ways to rethink or further explore how our users interact with us as a company as well as with our products. With that in mind, it would have been a missed opportunity if the eccentricity of our brand wasn’t immediately palpable from the very first interaction with our own operating system. We hope to break up the monotony that is the usual series of button clicks with a quirky, illustrated micro-comic (featuring a new addition to our mechanized menagerie!) that’ll make the introduction to Pop!_OS just a little more special.





#TryPopOS Contest

This week we launched #TryPopOS contest. This contest is gathering testimonials from users so that we can get as many people as possible to try Pop!_OS and provide their feedback. In the contest, we’re learning about how different users (makers, Scientists, Engineers, Dev Ops) are using the OS and what kind of apps they are using daily.



At the end of the contest, a raffle will be drawn for a qualified winner to receive either a trip to Denver or a Lulzbot Mini 3D printer. The winner will be announced January 11, 2016.



The first 100 entries will win exclusive swag. The first 100 have already been noted and we’ll be reaching out to them soon with more details.



For more information about the contest, visit http://s76.co/trypopos/

We’ve been having fun going through the testimonials from fans so far! In these past couple of days since we launched the contest we’ve already had 105 testimonial entries 290 requests to download Pop!_OS and give it a try. The contest ends on January 9 after the holiday season. So if you haven’t already given us your Pop!_OS testimonial, or done the seven day challenge and use Pop!_OS, you should get on it!

Here are some hand picked testimonials that we’ve liked so far:

“I absolutely love the look of POP!_OS! Everything looks great out of the box! The addition of the software center has made finding new software a breeze. Thank you System 76!”

“Linux as a sever has always been ten kinds of awesome. Linux as a desktop….eh…not so much. Pop! OS, with its funky colors and cool artistic vibe, is the first and only Linux desktop OS that I would consider using on a daily basis. In fact, I’ve already replaced my trusty Debain XFCE virtual machine with a fresh, new copy of Pop! Congrats! “

“So far I really enjoy the OS. The user interface is fantastic and simple. I enjoy the stylized icons and the intuitive nature of it. It looks a good sight better than Ubuntu´s current incarnation. It boots quickly and was a snap to install. Proud to support a made in Colorado product!”

That’s all for this week. Plenty of great stuff this week. I look forward to seeing you all next week, so until then stay safe, and happy computing! Same Pop! Time and same Pop! Channel.