Siva Dhayalan

I had decided to sell my desktop and use my older ThinkPad T440s full time. I decided to switch to Pop! OS running GNOME from Manjaro running KDE. I will miss the AUR and bleeding edge rolling releases. The main reason for the switch is KDE and the out of the box experience with Pop! OS, nothing against KDE; in fact, I loved the ability to customize the heck out of everything.

System76 has done an amazing job tweaking Pop! OS; it has become a very stable and fun-to-use OS; thanks to GNOME’s simplicity and focus user-experience. Since my new used ThinkPad has enough RAM, I don’t even need to worry about GNOME’s performance.

The following is a list of software and tweaks I added to make it viable for me.

• Touchpad gestures

  Install libinput-gestures for touchpad gesture.

  GNOME doesn’t have good gesture support out of the box, at least for laptop. So I had to use this FOSS to get some gestures working.

  sudo gpasswd -a $USER input // and restart PC
  
  sudo apt-get install wmctrl xdotool
  sudo apt-get install libinput-tools
  
  git clone https://github.com/bulletmark/libinput-gestures.git
  cd libinput-gestures/
  sudo make install
  libinput-gestures-setup start
  

• Install TLP

  Keep in mind the following set of will install and calibrate battery, so your screen will go blank for a few mins. It is best to run the following on a freshly started machine.

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/tlp
  sudo apt update
  sudo apt install tlp tlp-rdw --no-install-recommends
  sudo apt install acpi-call-dkms
  sudo tlp-stat
  
  sudo apt install powertop
  sudo powertop -c
  

• Install software not found in Pop!_Shop

  sudo apt install -y nautilus-dropbox
  sudo apt install -y code
  sudo apt install -y vlc
  sudo apt install neofetch // everybody needs to show off their unix
  

• Install and tweak touchpad drivers

  The default values for touchpad sensitivity is very janky. You will have to install and tweak as shown below. Find more details here.

  sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics // and reboot pc
  xinput // to find the touchpad device id
  xinput list-props X // replace X with touchpad device id
  xinput --set-prop X 316 14 17 128 // replace X, and tweak the numbers as necessary. These nums worked for me. FingerLow, FingerHigh, and FingerPress.
  

• Set Alt + Tab to switch windows, not applications

  gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-applications "[]"
  gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-applications-backward "[]"
  gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-windows "['<Alt>Tab']"
  gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-windows-backward  "['<Alt><Shift>Tab']"