Welcome back, Pop! Fans - time for an update on the week! We have some great stuff going on.

This week has been primarily been dominated by installer work. Daniel Foré from elementary flew in to work with us on what the new installer is going to be like. Last week, we shared quite a bit of the styling around Pop!_Shop and the installer with the visual designs. The work with elementary was focused on user experience around installation, drive partitioning, dual booting, and full disk encryption.

At the kick off, we discussed what the various screens should look like and how they should be organized., as well as full disk encryption. Full disk encryption is seen as an important part of security and privacy and should be a default option. We worked around the challenges of incorporating full disk in the UI and what it means for the backend and identifying the various scenarios that exist. A hurdle for a privacy and security focused OEM like System76 is how to deliver a computer with the encryption provided by default. Pre-encrypting would require a unique key for that user that can’t be guaranteed. If a user wanted to have encryption they would have to encrypt and re-install the whole OS which is also not ideal.

We focused on the fact that the disk is going to be encrypted, and we worked to optimize the install process around that choice.

We’re beginning initial work on the storyboard for what that optimization looks like. Below is a flow graph of the process that was agreed upon.





Comments are, of course, welcome. Feel free to come to our chat channel if you want to help participate in the design.

We are thrilled about the end result as we combine this with the designs of planets, moons and rocket ships that we previewed last week, to create a beautiful experience whether installing or logging in for the first time.

Big thanks to Daniel Foré and elementary for working with on us on creating a better experience for installing the operating system and first time login. Both teams will be fully engaged in completing the work. While elementary works on the UX design and front-end implementation System76 will be focusing on distinst: the backend of the installer. This is a great example of how collaboration can bring something worthwhile for everyone.

We’ll keep you all updated on the progress of this installer and the other great things in the pipeline.things we are working on.

See you next time, same Pop! Time and same Pop! Channel