Ubuntu Desktop weekly update – February 23, 2018

GNOME

• We’ve been working on a GNOME Online Accounts plugin for Ubuntu One. This will allow you to manage your U1 credentials and share them with services which need them, for example Canonical LivePatch. A MR is being proposed upstream.
• A bug has been fixed which caused some high contrast icons to be missing in System Settings.
• A fix for centering the date alignment in GNOME Shell has been merged upstream. And we’ve got an upstream review for the work to allow the volume to to amplified above 100%.
• There was a regression in the video acceleration work which caused corruption. This has been bisected and now fixed upstream.
• GNOME Shell performance with two monitors has had some more work done and should be fixed soon.
• Alexander Larsson and James Henstridge have been working on bringing snap support to portals. This work is happening upstream and making good progress. You can read more here.
  The associated work in snapd is here.
• In our team meeting this week we decided not to ship tracker by default in 18.04 but will look to enable it in 18.10. You can read more about what Tracker is and does here.
• GNOME Software in Bionic has support for snap channels now.

General

• The daily Bionic ISOs now feature a seeded snap (GNOME Calculator) in place of the deb. This is an early test to help us iron out the bugs before we look to move more applications to snaps in the final release.
• Network Manager 1.10 is now in Bionic proposed. Initial testing looks good, but if you find any problems please log a bug.
• We’ve refreshed the patches to enable hardware accelerated video playback in Chromium. We will distro patch this until such time as it lands upstream.
• We’ve also been doing work to better support the onscreen keyboard in Chromium under GNOME Shell, and you can test that work here.
• We’ve landed some improvements to BAMF to better match snap applications under Unity 7.
• BlueZ 5.48 has landed in Bionic.
• Support for themes in snaps is progressing well. You can read more about that work here.

Updates

• Chromium
  • Updated stable to 64.0.3282.167
  • Updated beta to 65.0.3325.73
• LibreOffice 6.0.1.1 is available in stable channel now. And 14.04, 16.04 and 17.10 all have a number of security updates.
• A stack of GNOME 3.27 updates have landed in Bionic. This includes things like gnome-keyring, gnome-desktop, gjs, evince, devhelp, dconf-editor, gnome-online-accounts, gvfs, orca screen reader and some games. This is all in preparation for the move to GNOME 3.28 for release.
• Webkitgtk 2.19 has also landed.

As always, you can comment or discuss any of these changes on the Community Hub.