Home sweet GNOME. It’s been a while but we’re excited to be back. We’ve been playing with our new toy the last few weeks. Our Slack channels were fiery fast but the geek debates have subsided. We’ve now gathered our thoughts and laid out our plan.

Consistency and Pop

We like consistency. We like it in everything from quality across products to packaging to our web and print design. Our new Pop theme was born from the desire to provide customers with a consistent experience all the way through to the OS. Pop is bright, beautiful, and very System76. We’re preparing Pop to ship on our computers with Ubuntu 17.10 this October. We want your bugs and feedback. See the bottom of the post for install instructions.

A World Class First Use Desktop

We want to take you seamlessly from the first time you press your power button to a desktop fully integrated with your online life. Mobile does this well. Sign into Gmail during Android’s setup and your mail, calendar, and contacts start syncing. GNOME has this built in but some spots are fickle and others don’t work at all. We’ll work on bug fixes and tightening up the Online Accounts experience.

Email is a bit contentious and feels like a gaping hole. Every platform has a simple, integrated mail client. Geary appears to be the best candidate but there are bugs to fix, Online Accounts integration, and features like folder management to add. We’re nervous about taking on an email client along with our other priorities. We’ll see how far we get and assess along the way.

We’d also like to pull GNOME Initial Setup into Ubiquity for Ubuntu. We’ll propose changes and work on patches.

Mobile Integration

You shouldn’t have to flip back and forth between your phone and monitor when you’re sitting at your computer. Seamless notifications from KDE Connect match our vision of desktop and mobile harmony. It provides actionable notifications from your phone on your desktop, the ability to securely send files between devices, clipboard sync and much more. We’ll work to make it a first class citizen on the GNOME desktop.

KDE Connect only works with Android phones. So I have to buy a new phone. Maybe we can do something about that.

Keeping It All Running with Blessed PPA’s

System76 delivers fixes, themes, and drivers via the System76 PPA (personal package archive). When Ubuntu upgrades from one distribution version to the next, it disables PPA’s thus stopping customers from receiving updates to their products. Disabling makes sense for unmaintained PPA’s, but for maintained PPA’s there should be a mechanism to keep them active. We’ll submit patches for Update Manager that adds a config file to allow listed PPA’s to remain during a release upgrade. We think other OEM’s, partners, and projects will appreciate this functionality as well.

What to Expect

Our first priorities are reaching and surpassing the current customer experience by 17.10. That includes bug fixes, adding Ubiquity features, removing GNOME Initial Setup, blessed PPA’s and the Pop theme complete from boot to the desktop. If we get further, we’ll go further. For 18.04 we’ll push towards our world class first use and mobile integration vision.

We’d been floating a while waiting for Unity 8. We worked on bugs in Unity 7 but we were hesitant to invest heavily. Now we have a target. We have a community. We have a platform. Let’s make an incredible Linux desktop.

Pop Theme Installation

The Pop theme can be installed via our PPA for Ubuntu 16.04 and 17.04. It works with both Unity and GNOME though our focus will be on the GNOME experience.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:system76-dev/stable

sudo apt update && sudo apt install system76-pop-theme

Set Pop as your theme for shell, gtk, icons, and cursors. Set fonts as such:

Window Titles: Fira Sans SemiBold 10

Interface: Fira Sans Book 10

Documents: Roboto Slab Regular 11

Monospace: Fira Mono Regular 11

Report issues on our GitHub projects.

https://github.com/system76/pop-gtk-theme/issues

https://github.com/system76/pop-icon-theme

Huge thanks to the projects that did the heavy lifting – Adapta, Papirus (itself adapted from Paper), and Fira. We’ll keep in sync with upstream and gladly contribute any changes they’d like to adopt.