Desktop weekly update - 23 March 2018

Bid “bonjour” to our Bionic Beaver!

Along with a sneak preview of our official Bionic mascot, it’s a short update this week as we’re all heads-down in bug fixing mode. There are a couple of links to check out if you’re interested in what sort of data we want to collect about hardware and setup, with links to the source.

GNOME
The Community Theme has been rebased on GNOME Shell 3.27.93 and switched to Bionic.

A graphics corruption issues has been bisected and fixed in Ubuntu. Upstream are working on getting a new ioctl in to the kernel and work is being tracked in the bug linked to below.


https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105518

We’ve fixed a bug with Synaptics touchpad drivers and Mouse & Touchpad settings in GNOME Control Center. The fix is also upstream.


https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/merge_requests/65

General
We’ve landed the first changes to the installer to gather some information about how the install has been configured. This data will be written to a file and will be viewable before being sent via a “first run wizard” which is under development.

The tool which gathers hardware information is being developed at the link below. On that page you can see an example of the sort of data that will be reported.

Updates
Libreoffice 6.0.2 has been promoted to the stable channel.

Snaps
The big news of the last few weeks is that Firefox is now available as a snap direct from Mozilla. If you like living life on the edge, then check out version 60 (also the next ESR release) which is available in the edge channel for testing.

To install it simply type:

sudo snap install --edge firefox

5 Likes

The announcement of the Firefox snap on the Ubuntu and snapcraft social media sites (e.g. Ubuntu on Facebook) suggested that Nightly would be available, presumably, therefore, eventually Nightly (currently 61) will be on edge and Beta (currently 60) will be on maybe beta?

I suspect the most relevant party to query about the future of the Firefox snap would be JohanLorenzo on the forum.

I have a question, not really dealing with this update. Will you be able to use the older Ubuntu Software Center in 18.04? I don’t care of the Apps Store or the way it follows the newer Windows 10, if I wanted Windows, I would be running windows. I hate Windows.

No, it’s not in the repositories for Ubuntu 16.10+. See here, there’s no link in the top right after xenial. You could try installing the xenial package but it might not work well and it may break your system, you might have to install other dependencies too.