#TryPopOS

[system76]

Pop!_OS Released and Thank you!

Last week was an exhilarating time for us as we launched the first release of Pop!_OS. This is the first step to an evolutionary path in creating the best user experience for makers, STEM, scientists, and developers.  An incredible amount of work was done in preparation for the release, as System76 came together like the well oiled machine it is to have the release on time, stable, and ready to download!

I’d like to thank our web and design team for putting together such an amazing website as part of the rebranding of the home page to promote this release. We’ve had several compliments about the site and its aesthetics.  

The engineering team and the UX team worked to fix all the critical bugs, and stayed up past business hours to put the finishing touches. Just so the experience could be just right.

Most of all, we would like to thank all of you for being the enthusiastic you.  For downloading Pop!_OS, posting how much you like it on social media, engaging in Reddit, in our chats, and being appreciative of the work.  Like you, we are creators too, and the positive responses that we get is what makes the effort worth it.  So, thank you!

@system76 #TryPopOs Well done guys, you gave that small push that ubuntu needed to be ready for work after installation with no tweaks!

Loving Pop_OS. Fantastic work from @system76​

@system76 It's amazing. Loved that you made important apps available so we don't have to download and set it up. The app store is amazing.

The team @system76 has done an amazing job with Pop!_OS. The minimalist install, the colors, and the icons are perfect. :100%:

First impressions of Pop Os are awesome. Nice job @system76. It works great out of the box for my MSI GS63VR

Have been using Pop_us from @system76 as my main OS the last few days. Really enjoying it's approach to UX.

@system76 as matter of fact Pop!_os counts as best linux distro that I ever used. totally love it. keep up the good work.

Here is  a group shot of staff from the Pop!_OS launch day:

We are only here because of all of you

Pop!_OS at All Things Open

We had a strong presence at All Things Open just days after Pop!_OS launched. It seemed to us that while traffic slowed at the other booths, we were busy the entire two days with a constant flow of people who were interested in Pop!_OS and System76 computers. It was great to meet people who’ve tried Pop!_OS and get such enthusiastic feedback in person.  One of my favorite things is having a conversation with someone about Pop!_OS and seeing their eyes really light up when we would give them a branded Pop!_OS USB stick - because now they could go back and try it on their machines, like RIGHT NOW!

Some things people were excited to learn about Pop!_OS at the conference:

People were really excited to hear about the keyboard shortcuts and that they were developed by a Developer to optimize their workflows. The fact that Pop!_OS is keyboard driven was particularly appealing.  You can find the keyboard shortcuts at http://pop.system76.com/docs/keyboard-shortcuts/ 

Pop!_Shop was a hit with booth attendees. The app store enables a consistent approach to applications, easily installed, and everything is working right out of the box.

People were excited by the fact that Pop!_OS enables us to respond quickly to issues and put the fix in right now instead of waiting for our upstream to fix hardware issues.

We had many people make multiple visits to try out our machines, and play with Pop!_OS.  Some gave early positive feedback on Pop!_OS.

Overall, Pop at #ATO2017 was a huge success!  We took a group photo of us and some enthusiastic attendees at the booth:

See you next time!  Same Pop! Time, same Pop! channel!

[system76]

Pop!_OS Weekly Update: Amping Up the Quality

Looks like this week is going to be two weeks worth of fun at System76. Double your pleasure, right?  :-)

OK, folks - Sri here: let me clue you in on what the busy people @System76 have been up to!

New Staff Members + Amping Up Quality:

First of all, I want to introduce two new members of our team.  The first person is Aaron Honeycutt, who will be doing customer support alongside the famous and adorable Emma Marshall.  Aaron comes from the Kubuntu community and is quite active there. With his familiarity with Ubuntu,  Aaron will be the Robin to Emma's Batman, the Honeycutt to Hawkeye.  See what I did there?  I got groans at the office when I said that.  I think I'm on a list.  I love being on lists!

The second person, Ben Shpurker, has joined us as our dedicated QA tester. Previously this role was shared between our Support, Engineering, and Management teams. And we’re really excited to have a dedicated person take on this important task. Ben’s level of detail has already really helped ensure our growing ambitions continue to meet our high standards. Since Ben has a strong Linux Background (playing with Linux since 7th grade and having interned with Red Hat twice), he will be especially laser focused on helping test Pop!_OS installation and features. This guy really doesn’t like bugs: not in his beer, not in his bed, and especially not in his software and hardware. We are going to amp up the quality with focused quality assurance through his efforts.

Every Little Detail Matters:

This round introduces several styling changes, refining the Pop!_OS user experience further, to wit: • We've introduced theme support for elementary/granite titlebars.  Those who use Elementary's Terminal will be familiar with the styling. • Introduced some new styling for the entry widget similar to the search ox in Pop!_Shop • Tab coloring in Terminal has been improved. We noticed that the tabs on the terminal previously looked out of place with the other colors that we had in light-theme. Now it should look more cohesive. • Pop!_Shop has seen some design changes in how applications are listed that should improve the presentation of applications in the store. • Design changes to how scrollbar presentation was also worked on.

Pop!_OS Beta Release:

Thank you for all the feedback that you gave us during the beta release last week.  Thanks to your efforts many bugs that were exposed through your feedback were addressed.  Please keep them coming!  Our release is less than a week away and the more feedback we get, the better the end result.  So be sure to post any feedback in our Reddit forum /r/pop_os.  If you find bugs then please create an issue at https://github.com/system76/pop-distro/issues.

As usual, we would love your feedback.  Our release is less than a week away and the more feedback we get, the better the experience!  Please make sure you post your feedback at https://github.com/system76/pop-distro/issues.

[system76]

System76 News: Platinum Luxury Bonus April Edition

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As the 4th month of the year comes to a close, we celebrate the 4th release of Pop!_OS, which had updates to GNOME, Ubuntu, and the Linux kernel, as well as new additions such as Dark Mode, Slim Mode, and Refresh Installs. Continue reading to get the scoop on what’s next for Pop!_OS and more!

Firmware

Coreboot is one step closer

We’ve expanded our Coreboot testing to the Intel model of Thelio. Galago Pro models and the Darter Pro have also received bug fixes for suspend, and improvements have been made for Thunderbolt. There are still some bugs buzzing around Coreboot, but initial tests look promising.                                 ��

Pop!_OS

Updates Galore with 19.04

In case you missed it, Pop!_OS 19.04 landed on the 18th! Here are a few features and upgrades released in 19.04:

The Slim Mode option maximizes your screen real estate by reducing the height of the header on application windows.

Dark Mode gives your applications a relaxing ambience for nighttime viewing. Both Dark Mode and Slim Mode can be activated in the Appearance settings menu.

Refresh Install allows you to reinstall Pop!_OS without losing Users and any data in your Home directories. This feature is available from the recovery partition on new installations (not upgrades) of both 19.04 and 18.04. For more information on how to do this, see our article on using the recovery partition.

Pop!_OS icons: The icons for Pop!_OS applications, files, and folders have been redesigned to complement GNOME’s icons under their new design guidelines. If you’re grieving the loss of the previous look, don’t fret; Pop! Planet offers the older icon theme as an option.

GNOME has been updated to version 3.32

See our blog post for thorough details on all the new updates and instructions on how to upgrade. Note that 19.04 will continue to see more features to help improve the desktop experience, so stay tuned in social media for those updates.

Software Packages

Discord and Alacritty were packaged for inclusion into our repos, though they will not appear in the Pop!_Shop until the appstream metadata is also added to our repositories.

Lutris, Gamehub, and VS Code have all received version updates.

Alacritty is a terminal emulator that uses the GPU to render the terminal and its contents. If you wish to set it as your default terminal application, you can do so by running the following command:

sudo update-alternatives --config x-terminal-emulator

Thank You Pop!_Volunteers

@stratact submitted a patch to refactor some of the code in Popsicle

@stratact also wrote a library and tool to aid with creating DEP11 appstream metadata, which is now a Pop! project.

@kylecorry31 has migrated development of the Do Not Disturb extension to our repos, which have also been updated. Repo

Conferences & Meetups

Upcoming Events

LinuxFest Northwest | Bellingham, WA | April 26-28

System76 is headed to LinuxFest Northwest on April 26th-28th! Come visit us at our booth over by the raffle area. Meet Emma, Thomas, Aaron, and Levi of our support team (and Alex, who also does things) and enjoy some banter with us about Linux, superheroes, the color pink, and any other topic you’re in the mood to talk about! We’re not too picky. Be sure to join Jupiter Broadcasting and System76 for our parking lot BBQ on Saturday, April 27th! RSVP on Meetup, where you can see all the details, or with Emma.

KiCon | Chicago | April 26-27

Louisa, our VP of Marketing, will be at KiCon in Chicago on April 26th-27th to talk about our work in KiCad designing the IO board for the Thelio desktop line. PCB there or be square!

Pop!_Release Party | Denver | May 4

On May 4th, come join us at our office in Denver, Colorado to celebrate Ubuntu and Pop!_OS 19.04 release! Meet System76 staff and members of the Colorado Ubuntu community, indulge in food and beverage, and take a tour of our factory. RSVP on Meetup, where you can see all the details, or with Emma, and May the 19.04th be with you!

Past Happenings

GNOME Party

On April 20th, we gathered at The Grateful Gnome in Denver to celebrate the release of GNOME 3.32! Drinks were shared. Tales were told. Pointy hats were dearly missed, but we still felt at gnome among friends.                                     

Press Coverage

Linus Tech Tips

Pop!_OS was featured on Linus Tech Tips this month! Watch hosts Anthony Young and James Strieb reenact the Matrix as they discuss gaming on Linux with Pop!_OS!

Level1Tech review of Thelio

Stares into the camera abound in Level1Tech’s new review! Enjoy the many faces of Wendell as he unpacks his first impressions of Thelio.

Opensource.com article on System76 manufacturing

Don Watkins of Opensource.com discusses System76’s use of open hardware in manufacturing Thelio.

Destination Linux and This Week in Linux

Michael Tunnell from Destination Linux and This Week in Linux was in Denver this month and decided to drop us a visit! You could say we were...his Destination. We treated him to lunch and a grand tour of le factory. We’re looking forward to seeing his reactions to his visit on his shows this week!

Customer Stories

Rock the TASBot for Mental Illness

Team TASBot is headed to Utah for their annual Desert Tesla Charity Drive, which will be streamed on the Oryx Pro! This Twitch stream features dwangoAC and TheAxeMan as they become wildly uncomfortable in their respective Teslas, as donations determine the methods of discomfort. Viewers are encouraged to use Crowd Control to alter a car’s features, such as the max speed, car horn, music, and internal temperature, and even make the car dance.

Funds raised during the stream go towards supporting the National Alliance on Mental Illness, an organization that advocates for educational programs and public policy and offers a free hotline for providing support and information.

If there's anything else you want to hear about in these newsletters in the future, be it tech or office dogs or anything in between, just shoot an email over to Katie.

[system76]

HiDPI is Released!  Work on Initial Setup continues and the TryPopOS contest

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.