March 16, 2018



Greetings Pop! Fans!

18.04 Pop!_OS Testing ISO

Soon we’ll publish testing ISOs of Pop!_OS 18.04 . This is a great opportunity for the community to test out the new features that are coming in and provide valuable feedback.

Repoman/Pop!_Shop:

Repoman will be integrated into Pop!_Shop (Pop’s Software Center). Repoman replaces Ubuntu’s Software and Updates app with a new repository tool built into Pop!_Shop. If you want to help out with Repoman or curious on how it works check out the Repoman repository.



Repoman is designed to work on any Debian based distro and is not specific to Pop!_OS. If Repoman is of interest to you, please let us know!



Performance and Power Profiles:

Performance and power are two of the most important considerations when working on a laptop. Sometimes you want to optimize for performance, like when you’re at work, connected to power, and compiling code on your two large monitors. Other times, you want to optimize for power, when you’re on a plane and coding or reading email with no access to power. On Southwest, in the middle seat. Sigh.

An early version of quick-access battery and performance profiles have just been completed. You will be able to access these profiles on laptops, from the system menu under the battery dropdown. You’ll be able choose the profile that best suits what you want to do. The current profiles are Maximum Performance | Balanced Performance | and Energy Saver. Pick the one that best suits you!

SCaLE 16x Reflections

Ubucon Keynote: System76 had a major presence at SCaLE 16x. We gave the opening talk for the Ubucon track on Thursday. The talk was entitled - “Unity Dumped Us! 7 Stages of Emotional Healing”. It described the emotional journey of how Pop!_OS came to be after Unity was, unfortunately, canceled. It was well received! We heard from a number of people who appreciated it! HiDPI Presentations: Next up David, our engineer that created the HiDPI engine, had a presentation where he demo’d the HiDPI daemon to SCaLE participants. David talked about why he started work on it, the results of his work, and the challenges that he faced while writing it. Several people who attended the talk also came by the booth to give us feedback on the presentation and try the daemon themselves. We also had the opportunity to demo the HiDPI daemon for two Inkscape developers who were quite impressed with seeing Inkscape usable on several different resolutions. We had a special four monitor setup to show off the HiDPI work at SCaLE. In general, we had a grand time at SCaLE. We made new friends, reconnected with old friends and had a blast speaking with everyone that came to our booth. Popcorn was distributed, Aaron went around the conference in System76 penguin suit, and I spent a lot of time roving from one booth to another talking about Pop!_OS, System76 and desktop Linux. We really feel we tipped the SCaLE in our favor! GNOME, KDE, and upstream shoutouts: A special shoutout to Michael Hall and Nuritzi Sanchez who manned the GNOME booth and distributed our stickers at the table. They even asked for more when the stickers ran out! Special thanks to the KDE booth next door who were big fans of Pop!_OS and wore the t-shirts and booted Pop!_OS. It was a blast to see so much support from all the upstream projects that form desktop Linux. We really appreciate all of you, and look forward to creating special ties with these projects. Finally, a personal thanks to the teams at Ubuntu community, Private Internet Access and Endless, with whom we shared a special bond these past couple of days.It was great to have our teams interact so well with each other.



HiDPI Daemon Released

The HiDPI daemon has been released after an intense couple of weeks in engineering. The HiDPI daemon has a new and greatly improved layout engine. The layout engine now uses saved monitor configurations to arrange displays and keeps display placement as close as possible even as they change relative (resolution) size. You can now set any appropriate LoDPI resolution, and the HiDPI daemon will use it.

https://github.com/pop-os/system76-driver/issues/8

https://github.com/pop-os/system76-driver/issues/9

https://github.com/pop-os/system76-driver/issues/10

Several bugs were reported in the field that have also been corrected. We’ve gone through a lot of testing and it has proven to work quite well. We are currently working on adding GSettings and a DBus API to allow other distros to create their own graphical interfaces to the daemon. The HiDPI daemon, which is currently part of the System76 driver, will become its own package and move into Pop!_OS proper. That means anyone who runs Pop!_OS will be able to use the HiDPI daemon as opposed to just System76 customers.

That’s all for this week. See you next time! Same Pop! time, same Pop! channel.