Will Cooke

Bionic Beaver, the codename for the next Ubuntu LTS release, is due in April 2018 and will ship with both the traditional Xorg graphics stack as well as the newer Wayland based stack, but Xorg will be the default. 17.10, released in October 2017, ships with the Wayland based graphics server as the default and

Here’s an update on what we’ve been working on over the last couple of weeks: GNOME We’ve been working on a patch for udisks to hide snaps from applications such as GNOME’s Disks.  This will hide all loop devices, including installed snaps, from disk management utilities making it less confusing and less cluttered.  We’ve reworked

Here’s the last newsletter for 2017, we’ll be back in the new year. On behalf of the whole Desktop Team I wish you all a happy holiday and a peaceful 2018. GNOME Some important fixes landed in fonts-noto-emoji.  🍔  🍺 🧀 Work continues on removing as much gtk2 as we can. A fresh 18.04 install now only installs

GNOME GNOME Disk Utility If you have snaps installed and open the Disks utility, your snaps appear as loop devices. We found this to be confusing and a bit messy, so we have proposed a fix upstream and this should be merged soon. Theme The community theme topic has been very busy on the hub. Yesterday we

  The big news this week is the availability of Bionic daily ISOs. As always, we’re beavering away on the desktop: GNOME We’ve started a conversation on the GNOME mailing list to talk about locking down extensions which are part of a “mode” (a set of compulsory extensions and other settings). Ubuntu ships a mode

As you’re no doubt aware, the default Ubuntu desktop is now running GNOME Shell following the 17.10 release and so we naturally have a great deal of interest in the plans and direction of the GNOME project.  The best way for us to get more involved in the future of GNOME is to become a

I’ll be starting the weekly round-up posts again now that the release is out and 18.04 is getting under way. At this early stage in the development cycle we’re spending a week or so tidying up the loose ends from 17.10, SRUing the important fixes that we’ve found, getting ready to sync new packages from

We’re less than a week away from Final Beta! It seems to have come round very quickly this cycle. Next week we’re at the Ubuntu Rally in New York City where we will be putting the finishing touches to the beta. In the meantime, here’s a quick rundown on what happened this week: GNOME The

A fairly short update this week as we’re in bug fixing mode ahead of final beta in a couple of weeks. GNOME This week saw the release of GNOME 3.26, and we’re ready to ship it in 17.10. This will bring new versions of the core applications and new features as described in the GNOME

   From everyone at Ubuntu, our hearty congratulations and thanks for the 3.26 release. As you’re no doubt aware by now the next release of Ubuntu, the Artful Aardvark, is only a few short weeks away and will bring the latest GNOME desktop environment with it. We’d planned to ship 3.26 from the beginning of

GNOME GNOME Shell 3.25.91 is now in Artful in preparation for the move to 3.26 before release. We’re adding notification badge support to the Dock extension. This branch has been proposed to the upstream project and is awaiting review. We’ve packaged the KStatusNotifier extension to provide support for indicators. This will provide suppor

GNOME Shell Didier has written a series of blog posts detailing how we’ve set up the Ubuntu GNOME Shell session in Artful to co-exist with the default GNOME Shell experience and still give us the flexibility we need to shape the experience as we would like. You can start at day one here.  We worked

GUADEC The GNOME conference happened last week with good representation from Ubuntu. The spirit was good and the discussions constructive. Decisions were made, details can be read on https://didrocks.fr/2017/08/03/ubuntu–guadec-2017-and-plans-for-gnome-shell-migration/ GNOME Shell We’re preparing to make the changes described above in the

Here’s the latest in the world of Desktop: GNOME We’ve been looking at ways to port the feature of allowing the sound to go above 100%. This is needed because some computers (e.g. Thinkpad X220) have a fairly low volume at 100% and so adding some software amplification is a useful addition. While this does

GNOME We’re working on adding captive portal detection to Artful. We think it would be good if there were an option in the privacy settings to enable or disable this. We’ve done some initial work as preparation – some patches have been submitted to Network Manager’s upstream to enable an option to be created. They are currently awaiting r

We’re mid-way through the Ubuntu Artful development cycle, with the 17.10 release rapidly approaching on the horizon. Now is a great time to start exercising the new GNOME goodness that’s landed on our recent daily images! Please download the ISO, test it out on your own hardware, and file bugs where appropriate. If you’re lucky