Ubuntu Desktop weekly update – 13 April 2018

Wow, only two weeks to go until the Beaver is born, this cycle seems have flown by.  So what’s been going on in the last couple of weeks, and what can we expect to change in the run up to release day?

We’re still working on adding a new first-login experience to guide people through configuring LivePatch and making decisions about sharing system information.  That work has landed in the archive and been reviewed for inclusion but we have to finalise the designs and get the last couple of bugs out. In the meantime you can configure LivePatch through the “Software & Updates” tool in the “Updates” tab.  If you’d like to try the in-development code, install

gnome-initial-setup 

(note, it’s still a work-in-progress).

The Free Culture Showcase wallpapers have been voted on and the winners selected. These have been uploaded to Bionic.

The community theme will be available as a snap for people to test in 18.04 LTS.  Didier has written up the details here.

We’ve been working with upstream to help narrow down the cause of the memory leaks in GNOME Shell and there will be a fix coming soon.  We’ve tested the experimental fix and have confirmed it works. This will find it’s way into Bionic for release.

We’ve also been working on some performance improvements for GNOME Shell and have a merge request open upstream.

A number of seg fault crashers have also been identified and fixed and we’ve moved to GNOME 3.28.1.

Thanks to Xubuntu developer ali1234 we’ve narrowed down a problem which was causing the live ISO images to start very slowly. We’ve patched fontconfig and are discussing with the upstream developers.

We’ve pushed new revision of Chromium to the candidate channel with ibus support, and since promoted to stable channel.  The Libreoffice snap also added ibus support via the new desktop helpers, and pushed 6.0.3.2 snap to candidate channel and updated call for testing.  LibreOffice 6.0.3 is now in Bionic.

If you’d like to spend some time testing 18.04 LTS before release, please download the images from http://cdimage.myasnchisdf.eu.org/daily-live/current/ and report any bugs you find via Launchpad.