At System76 we all work in the same office so keeping the external Pop!_OS community involved and up-to-date is an interesting challenge. So far we’ve been communicating our ideas and work through our chat channel and blog. This week we decided to hold our first System76+Community meeting in Pop!_Chat to discuss default settings and apps. While the overall outcome was fantastic, there are definitely ways we can increase bandwidth between those at System76 HQ and community members around the world. We’re working on some ideas.

Moving Pop!_OS to 17.10

Our current Pop!_OS .iso is built from Ubuntu GNOME 17.04. We’ve been refining the build process and tooling for the move to 17.10.

We are now using debootstrap to build from a minimal Ubuntu base instead of the full Ubuntu desktop, which allows maximum flexibility.

We’ve reduced the memory usage substantially

We’ve reduced the .iso size

We will be releasing the Pop!_OS 17.10 alpha iso once we’ve completed additional internal testing.

Default Settings

Pop!_OS will use X by default with an optional Wayland session. While Wayland has really great benefits including better performance, reduced flicker, and improved HiDPI multi-monitor support, we’re concerned about customers that rely on applications like VirtualBox and the lack of a clarity when Wayland is the reason an application isn’t working. Being our first release, we’re being more conservative in this particular decision.

We’re interested in refining the keyboard shortcut experience in Pop!_OS. We’ll compose a keyboard shortcut proposal and discuss our ideas with the community.

For Alt-Tab behavior, we prefer Unity’s experience and are going to look into replicating its functionality.

Because GDM does not adopt user themes, the Pop!_OS login screen does not match the rest of the desktop. We’ll patch gnome-shell to fix this theme inconsistency.

Finally, we discussed providing extensions via debian packages, the GNOME extensions site, or patching core functionality into the shell.. Because we have to package gnome-shell for GDM and thus the distro, we plan to patch Pop!_Theme and the suspend button into the shell. We’ll need to verify this approach with upstream GNOME and that it does not interfere with customers using the Tweak tool to customize these choices.

Default Apps

Our principles for default app inclusion were drafted prior to our meeting and agreed upon in chat.

Include apps that create a cohesive desktop experience A link opens a browser

An event invite adds it to the Calendar

Defining a word opens Dictionary (future release)

An address opens Maps (proposed feature) Leverage online accounts Surface users online data in local applications Prefer GNOME Core apps and apps that follow the GNOME HIG Include apps that open common formats Include utilities that enable accessing and manipulating external media Make external media immediately useful When there is no clear app for a universal need, surface options in the app store If no email client provides the quality and integration we need, surface options in the store Do not duplicate functionality Be constantly cognisant of memory use

Default applications:

Document Viewer

GNOME Calendar

GNOME Contacts

GNOME Calculator

GNOME Terminal

Files (Nautilus)

Image viewer (Eye of GNOME)

GNOME Photos

Firefox

Software Center - (elementary OS AppCenter maybe called the Pop!_Shop)

Applications where additional investigation is needed:

Media Player (Totem or GNOME MPV)

LibreOffice

Won’t be installed by default:

Tweak tool - it’s our opinion that some features of Tweak tool should be present in Settings. It will take time to pull those out so we’ll leave Tweak tool out by default rather than add Tweak tool and remove it later.

Email client - we won’t have one installed by default this release. We’re excited to see where elementary Mail goes.

Maps and Dictionary probably won’t make this release. Dictionary might if we can get our integration idea completed in time.

Weather

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p>Thank you to everyone that joined us on Pop!_Chat to participate in this discussion! Next week is our installer sprint with elementary OS. We’ll have lots of news for next week’s update!