OEM Recommendations

Recommendations

The following are recommendations for hardware designed to run elementary OS. While they are not requirements, meeting these recommendations will ensure your product more closely aligns with the design of elementary OS itself.

These recommendations are in flux. We should probably come up with some sort of ranking, i.e. strong recommendation versus nice-to-have. This might also not end up being the final location for these, i.e. we could put them at elementary.io/oem. But this is a place to draft them for now.

Display Size & Resolution

elementary OS does not support non-integer (fractional) scaling. Thus, it is important that displays use a combined size and resolution that results in a readable and crisp display for users when using either 1× or 2× scaling. We consider under 192 DPI to be "loDPI" and above to be "HiDPI," though the exact ideal ranges are more nuanced.

Use Dippi to ensure your display is in an ideal range for either loDPI or HiDPI. We also strongly recommend using the term "HiDPI" if you device display meets the ideal range at 2× scaling.

See What Is HiDPI? for more details.

Boot Logos

Depending on the boot speed of the device, any of the following may be appropriate:

• No boot logo (i.e. black screen). If the pre-OS portion of the boot is a fraction of a second, it might be better to omit an OEM boot logo. Otherwise, it flashes briefly and just adds visual noise.
• OEM boot logo. If the pre-OS boot logo is shown for a moment, it should be on a black background. This ensures it flows more nicely with the elementary logo on a black background.

Devices should not use the elementary logo in a boot splash before the OS; i.e. if a user installs an alternate OS, the elementary logo should not appear on boot.

Function & Media Keys

Ideally, function keys on a laptop would cover controls (i.e. "media keys") that show on-screen confirmations:

• volume (mute, up, down)
• display brightness (up, down)
• keyboard brightness (if backlit)
• media playback (play/pause, skip)

Since elementary OS does not make much use of F1–F12 keys, ideally a keyboard will perform the media key functionality first, and F1–F12 functions when using a "Fn" modifier key. Ideally this is also reflected in the prominence of the design of the keys: icons for media keys should be larger and more prominent, with the F1–F12 designations smaller.

If an "airplane mode" media key exists, it should be togglable in software as well to prevent accidental and seemingly-unrecoverable network outages.

Suspend/Resume

Ideally, a laptop should automatically resume when opening the lid—not requiring pressing a power button, keyboard key, or trackpad. Barring that, any of those interactions should wake the laptop.