The LITTLE Things

A lot of what distinguishes POP!_OS is its behind-the-scenes attention to detail. Things that are traditionally annoying are simple with Pop! System76 has written its own HIDPI daemon, which you can read all about at http://bit.ly/lxf252hidpi. It makes light work of whatever complicated display arrangement you’re running, and can even manage mixed Hi and LODPI displays with cunning scaling. Wayland is disabled out of the box, but you can enable it by editing /etc/ gdm3/custom.conf and commenting the line: Waylandenable=false

You’ll then see the usual cog icon when you type in your password at login, and you can choose between Wayland and X.org sessions. Wayland in some multi-dpi situations performs better than X, and in our testing we only ran into a few niggles – mostly using Fedora’s experimental Firefox Wayland flatpak from https://firefox-flatpak. mojefedora.cz.

It’s easy to dismiss POP!_OS as just another Ubuntu clone, but we don’t do features on insipid distros, so there must be something to it. Beyond what we’ve written about here, there are so many other little tweaks to make life easier. These have been done cleverly so you hardly notice them. With users at the heart of its design and that design informed from the unique viewpoint of an OEM, Pop is just lush. It’s perfect as a beginner’s distro, but it hasn’t been ‘dumbed down’ in any way. It’s so flexible and powerful that more advanced users will enjoy it too. Heck, we just installed it on the official LXF

laptop (Jonni’s Eee PC!–ED). So there.