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. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=790279
Theme. The community theme topic has been very busy on the hub (Design Mockups (Updates Designer only) - Theme Refresh - Ubuntu Community Hub). Yesterday we spent the day with the Ubuntu design team to work on some of the Ambiance bugs for 18.04. There are a number of small fixes which we want to make while the community theme is maturing. A lot of these are small bite-sized bugs which we will log as bugs on Launchpad and share links via the hub if people would like to help out.
Emoji. The fonts-color-emoji package has landed in Bionic! Bug #1734885 “[MIR] fonts-noto-color-emoji” : Bugs : fonts-noto-color-emoji package : Ubuntu 
GJS. There are various crashes happening in GNOME Shell because gjs (the Javascript engine) is trying to act on invalid objects, so we’ve got a merge proposal up to make this a bit more robust. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gjs/merge_requests/22
Unity 7
We’ve also been fixing some Unity 7 bugs for our LTS users. 27 in total! You can see the full list here and verify the fixes: https://community.ubuntu.com/t/unity-stack-sru-for-ubuntu-16-04-help-verify/2420
Snaps
The GNOME Software plugin for snap support and the associated snapd-glib library are available in Debian.
We’ve made some improvements to the startup time of snaps by moving the generation of some of the caches to the snap generation stage. We still need to make some changes to snapcraft to make this automatic, and for snaps using the GNOME platform snap we have a an update for snapcraft-desktop-helpers to benefit from this work. There is also an improvement to snapcraft-desktop-helpers for people using locally installed fonts in ~/.fonts or ~/.local/share/fonts.
We’re working on adding the ability to easily change the tracks and channels of snaps via GNOME Software. You can see the discussion here: Channel support in GNOME Software - snapcraft.io
Updates
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Chromium
Uploaded 62.0.3202.94 to Bionic
Updated beta and snap beta channel to 63.0.3239.59
Updated dev to 64.0.3269.3 and updated snap in edge channel -
LibreOffice
Updated snap to 5.4.3, now in candidate channel. Please test.
5.4.3 in bionic-proposed
In The News
Dell’s Sputnik programme turned five years old this week. You can read more about how these developer focused Ubuntu laptops came to be on Barton’s blog here: Project Sputnik Turns Five! | Barton's Blog
on hiding the loop back snaps in Gnome-Disks!