Required Reading
First party info is almost always good. This guide is good. As Pop and Ubuntu share a common ancestor, almost everything here applies.
One thing that doesn’t apply (unless you change it) is that Pop doesn’t use grub for booting. So that part won’t work for us.
There is also some important info for us in the battery guide:
Kernel Stuff for power management
Background: I am leaving out a lot of detail, but know that System76 moved mountains for their system76-power and related packages in order to have a first-class experience for laptop power management on AMD platforms. I’ve come to like it pretty well for 6000 and other 7000-series AMD chipsets I’ve been kicking around the office for folks.
Technically this is a required part of Pop OS.
Separately, AMD is working on their own version(s) of power-profiles-daemon. It’s really good! Can make a huge positive impact to battery life. This is the one Framework recommends, and it works exceptionally well on the framework 16.
There is also a part of this conversation related to changes inside of gnome, wake from sleep, and hybrid graphics where one can have a dGPU and iGPU, with policies like… don’t wake the dGPU on battery. I’ll not get into that here, but be aware…
If you were thinking of bailing for Ubuntu vanilla or Manjaro, now’s your chance. Otherwise, press on…
TODO
Fingerprint Reader
This just works – impressively so. In Framework’s guide they show it as part of the default Ubuntu loadout; this isn’t the case on Pop. No problem!
sudo apt install fprintd libpam-fprintd
sudo pam-auth-update
Be sure that fingerprint options are enabled in the pam-auth-update configuration, then enroll some fingers at Users > Fingerprint Login
Troubleshooting
Pop doesn’t use grub by default; one users kernelstub to manipulate the kernel. If you get a kernel panic updating the kernel one can hit E a bunch of times as the system is booting to get a menu to select an older kernel. E literally edits the boot line, so you may have to press escape if you hit E too many times?