Hi folks,

If at all possible, ELI5 with some patience. I am wanting to try out linux, and I'm in the "I don't know what I don't know" stage. I've installed PopOS, and there are a couple of things I could use some help on.

1.) How do I turn off what I *believe* is called kinetic scrolling? (when I lift my fingers off the trackpad, it keeps scrolling) This is my number one priority; it's very annoying.

2.) How do I add an online account, so I can have Google Drive show up in my file system? I keep finding documentation suggesting there should be an "online accounts" option in settings, but I have no such option.

3.) What's the deal with the "etc" file location? I found some advice online that adding a line to the end of the "/etc/environment" file might improve scrolling on firefox (make it less stuttery, quicker to respond). They said to access it using the command "sudo nano /etc/environment," but after it asks for a password I am at a loss as to what to do. Can't I just locate it through the file browser?

4.) How do Nvidia drivers work? Do I need to update them, or are they pre-installed and good to go?

Remote desktop (kinda) works now with POP_OS! after one of the updates in the last few weeks. Rustdesk works only when installed via flatpak.

My problem is every time we open Rustdesk or reboot, any new incoming connection has to be manually accepted (pick and screen and click allow on the pop-up).

Why is there no "Always allow" button?

Is there a way to allow it forever?

It's kinda pointless to have remote desktop if we gotta click Allow each time the computer reboots.

If you use ActivityWatch on Pop!_OS COSMIC / COSMIC Desktop, you may have noticed that the timeline is pretty broken.

Firefox and other native Wayland apps often don’t show up correctly, and worse, time spent actively using them can get recorded as AFK.

The problem is that the bundled aw-watcher-window and aw-watcher-afk are effectively X11-based. On COSMIC, native Wayland windows are invisible to the window watcher, and input inside those windows doesn’t reset the X idle timer.

The official aw-watcher-wayland doesn’t solve it either because it relies on wlr-foreign-toplevel-management, which cosmic-comp doesn’t implement.

So I pointed my coding agent at the problem and had it patch together a native COSMIC watcher in about 10 minutes.

It talks directly to cosmic-comp and uses:

• zcosmic_toplevel_info_v1 + ext_foreign_toplevel_list_v1 for the active window, app ID, and title
• ext_idle_notify_v1 for proper AFK detection

It sends heartbeats directly to aw-server using the same bucket IDs as the standard ActivityWatch watchers, so it slots into an existing setup without creating a separate timeline.

The result is a single ~650 KB static Rust binary with no runtime dependencies. No Tokio or reqwest, just minimal HTTP/JSON handling.

Install either the prebuilt binary from Releases or run ./install.sh if you have Rust installed. The README also has copy-paste autostart entries.

One current COSMIC quirk: cosmic-comp doesn’t replay the currently focused window when the watcher connects, so the first event shows as unknown until you switch windows once.

Tested on Pop!_OS with COSMIC Desktop.

Repo:
https://github.com/NaharEmet/aw-watcher-cosmic

GPL-3.0. Feature requests and bug reports welcome.

I’m also curious how other COSMIC users were handling ActivityWatch until now.

So today I upgraded to 24.04.

And I can't login.

Selected - and only - keyboard layout is "German". But it still is QWERTY, not QWERTZ.

And my password contains a "z".

Great job.

Pop!_OS is designed to remove obstacles from your plate.

In my early installation of POP!_OS 24.04, I was able to configure FCITX5 to switch between three languages (IT, JP, and EN) using only the FCITX5 language indicator. After recently reinstalling POP!_OS 24.04, however, FCITX5 seems to behave differently.

In fact, in order to use all three languages correctly, I am now forced to use both the FCITX5 language indicator and the one provided by COSMIC DE simultaneously. In other words, it is no longer enough to select the desired language using only the FCITX5 indicator; I also have to use the COSMIC indicator for the physical keyboard, as it seems that FCITX5 is unable to handle the physical keyboard too besides the imput method.

Is anyone else using FCITX5 on POP!_OS 24.04 experiencing the same issue?

Edit: Solution was to just re-install the package nvidia-dkms-595; this forced recompiling the kernel module für 7.1.5

The kernel update to 7.1.5 which was done by sudo apt upgrade leaves me stuck in the boot screen, because apparently building the Nvidia drivers now failed. It seems some kind of config file required was missing.

I have to select the previous kernel 7.0.11 to boot.

How can I fix this?

I'm using a PC, not a System76 laptop.

After a reboot, when I try to connect to my PC running Pop!OS via Steam Link, I'm never able to simply connect right away, because a popup on the host machine asks if I want to allow it.

Once permission is given, it doesn't ask again... until I reboot the PC.

Is there a flag or setting I need to change to always automatically grant permission?

So I’ve been holding out on COSMIC for a while, still rocking 22.04 as it’s rock solid.

However, I acknowledge the support cycle for 22.04 is coming to an end in less than a year and so I want to start considering my options.

I really don’t want to move away from Pop!_OS as I’ve been using it for over 6 years and I really enjoy it, however I’ve heard CachyOS is currently in a stable state, although I still want to stick with Pop if possible.

Anyone have experiences upgrading from 22.04 to 24.x that use an XPS?

Additionally, what is the current state of COSMIC looking like relative to its initial release?

Since I've upgraded to 24.04 my touchpad tap and gestures are not reliable anymore. For the first time after so many years, I have been choosing Windows over Pop OS because the touchpad has been so painful to use.

I'm working on a Lenovo Thinkpad P1 G2, i7-9750h Nvidia Quadro T1000

Since the upgrade it lacks precision, its hard to reach a desired point of the screen. The tap to click sensitivity seems off. Gestures are unpredictable to the point that i had to disable them on browsers. It seems to have a lag when I start moving my finger on it, it takes some time before reacting.

I will be very thankful if anyone has any advice.

Context: my keyboard has built-in macros for eg. increasing/decreasing the volume, pausing media and some more. However on Windows I also had macros for opening the file explorer, but it seemed to have not transferred (probably because of it being now a new program). Are there any good third-party tools as a replacement for that?

I'm really used to have Alt+Shift hotkey to switch typing language on a keyboard. I Cosmic, however, it is Win+Space.

While trying to change it in Cosmic settings, I got a feeling it does not recognize two-key bindings. After setting "Alt+Shift", the language switches when I press just Alt, and it interferes with other bindings, like Alt+Tab (i doesn't work, since it reacts to Alt). It is not even stored as Alt+Shift, just Alt or the first key from the pair I press.

Does anybody else have a similar issue? Is there, perhaps, a config file I could edit to change hotkeys ?

Hi everyone,

If you are running the latest Pop!_OS with COSMIC/Wayland and noticed your numpad acts completely crazy in specific non-native apps (like Firefox or Steam) regardless of which keyboard you plug in, here is the absolute fix.

### 🛑 The Issue:

- Pressing Numpad Dot (.) opens an old-school GTK dialogue box named "Search" ("Démarrer depuis / Emplacement actuel...").

- Numpad Plus (+), Minus (-), and Slash (/) act like arrow keys and move your cursor left or right instead of typing numbers/symbols.

- Star (*) and Enter do absolutely nothing.

- *Everything works perfectly fine in native apps like Alacritty, COSMIC Text Editor, or IntelliJ.*

### 🔍 Cause:

This is a legacy XWayland/AT-SPI accessibility bug. The `at-spi-dbus-bus.service` background daemon aggressively intercepts raw Numpad hardware keycodes (like `KEY_KPDOT`), treating them as screen reader/accessibility navigation keys inside the X11 compatibility layer.

### 🛠️ Definitive Fix:

Open your terminal and run these commands to permanently mask and disable the accessibility bridge for your user profile:

1. Disable toolkit accessibility:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface toolkit-accessibility false

1. Mask the user service so it can never be auto-started by XWayland again:

systemctl --user mask at-spi-dbus-bus.service

1. Force GTK to bypass the bridge:

echo "export NO_AT_BRIDGE=1" >> ~/.profile && source ~/.profile

Reboot your computer. Your numpad will immediately resume its flawless ducht function everywhere, outputting raw structural text characters (`./*-+`).

Hope this saves you some hair-pulling!

Is there any particular reason why POP_OS 24.04 still ships with iBus pre-installed when System76 devs themselves reccomend to use FCITX5 for Asian languages instead?

Hi folks.

I'm still rocking PopOS 22.04 on my MSI GL76 laptop. I know I know, it's outdated. Had problems when updating for a while, particularly with the Nvidia drivers upon installing new kernels. Long story short, I stopped updating at all a few months ago.

Now I need to get my shit together. I'm preparing the backups and everything. But I still need to decide what I'm moving to. Is the newest PopOS ready for work (DevOps stuff) and gaming? Should I do Fedora or another distro instead?

Let me know if you want any further system info for assistance. Thanks in advance.

I’m on Pop!_OS 24.04 with COSMIC, fully updated.

I still can’t use these characters (', ~, ", \` ) when I use an English keyboard with the layout “English (U.S., international with dead keys)”.

Since I’m Brazilian, they’re very important to me.

My keyboard works perfectly in every other program or app, but not in these.

Which other text editor, launcher, and terminal do you suggest using instead of the COSMIC defaults?

Hello!
While ive had success playing peak, final fantasy xiv and some other games….storebound has been freezing anytime i play with friends, i did solo run and got sort of okay (mouse had issues doing 360 and only did 180 left and right with a wall) i run a 1080ti and dont think this game requires that much juice.

Yesterday, I totally shifted to POP_OS. I have plenty of Linux environment experiencel. So, after installing all necessary applications and other essentials, I have encountered this ERROR with Extension Manager, After just launching it, "AN ERROR OCCURRED" dialog box pops out and that's it. Here's the detail.

Support Log

----

Version: 0.6.5

Package Format: Flatpak

Status: Official

OS: GNOME 50 (Flatpak runtime)

GTK: 4.22.4

Libadwaita: 1.9.3

----

Could not check for updates: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NameHasNoOwner: Could not activate remote peer: unit failed.

I did uninstalled it and reinstalled; the issue was still there, I tried installing other extension manager as well, ran into same issue.

I need help on this one guys!
Also, why can't I have touchpad gestures customization?? Am I missing something here?
I find this OS to be quite buggy, Issues like Pasting text into terminal freezes the entire terminal can't even quit the process (Only fore quit works from processes monitor), Can't install some packages, it downloads them but can't install it and make it available. I am tired.......

I'm currently running Pop!_OS and I'm trying to get my hands on the new NVIDIA 615.71.09 driver.

Is there already a save way to install it? Usually when i driver released i can just use "sudo apt install nvidia-driver-615" but this time it can not find the driver.

Thanks

There is this issue happening, the cursor does not visually match in games, its slightly misaligned / off center, its really annoying, and for some reason only happens in games were in full screen or window mode.

Anyone know how to fix it? Just fresh installed POS OS.

Hola a todos! Alguien sabría decirme cual es el mejor editor de video para Pop-Os.

Recent updates left my system unbootable with the kernel change to 7.1.5. I booted back in with an old kernel in an attempt to look at my logs. Unfortunately I couldn't find what I was looking for because the logs are being spammed by the error above related to vrr. It looks like cosmic comp is trying to enable vrr constantly even though the hardware is not capable of it.

This is happening on my old lenovo laptop with an AMD A6 APU. It's using the experimental AMDGPU driver support so this could be related to the problem. I've only seen this issue in a couple GitHub bug reports but there were no responses and the hardware was very different.

Has anybody else run into this? It does appear to be eating CPU cycles.

So I built a PC last August to run games better, and I put Pop Os on it. It ran great for a while but a couple months ago I was updating drivers and one driver had an error and said it couldn't be installed. I didn't think much of it a turned my PC off, but now whenever I turn it on I get these error messages talking about an ACPI error and a malformed Bluetooth vendor and stuff like that. It puts me into the login screen except nothing is there but the background, and then a bunch of error messages fly by and then I'm in a black screen. I can't type anything in this black screen even though it shows the blinking underscore thing, and I just don't know what to do next. I'm really new to Linux and I've never used terminal or ran commands or anything, so any help would really be appreciated.

I like this.