Hi everyone, below you will find the updates from the Desktop team from the last week.
If you’re interested in discussing a topic please start a thread in the Desktop area of the Community Hub (this site).
We also have our weekly meeting on IRC. We meet on Tuesday at 13:30 UTC in #ubuntu-desktop on Freenode. There will be an “Any Other Business” section at the end where you are welcome to raise topics. These topics might be discussed during the meeting, or afterwards depending on the time, depth of conversation, topic and so on.
Fix 4: st-icon code (I need more time to remember now)
Fix 5: Revert the mozjs leak fix to avoid aggressive (CPU intensive) garbage collection. Well, that was only a proof of concept. I will hunt for an alternative fix that doesn’t revert it.
Porter box access: Debugged several problems with IS and also found a bug in the GNOME Control Center’s VPN config part. Confirmed that a proposed fix works.
Stripped app and panel icons out of the icon themes, saves about 10M for the current snap but with the after the addition of the Mint themes it’ll save more than 60M
prepared 62.0.3 security update (USN-3778-1) and uploaded to cosmic-proposed and to the ~ubuntu-mozilla-security PPA (bionic, xenial, trusty)
getting beta branch (63) to build on cosmic on all supported architectures
refreshed the unity menubar patch: upstream refactoring removed private APIs that the patch relied upon, so I had to refactor the patch accordingly
vendored cbindgen and its dependencies into the package, as it’s not available in debian/ubuntu yet
fixed a handful of build failures on arm64, armhf, ppc64el
chromium
updated dev branch to 71.0.3559.6
with Sergio’s help, figured out a workaround to the snapcraft bug that made snaps fail to build on !amd64 (still unsure why they were actually succeeding on amd64 though)
Main issues found with VMs: Image doesn’t boot on VirtualBox and system doesn’t boot on first boot on first boot on qemu. No issue on VMware. There is also a plymouth crash that results in a black screen on boot.
You can workaround the boot issue in VirtualBox by setting nomodeset. On boot, press any key to display the boot menu, then F6, select nomodeset, Enter twice to validate and boot.
start-document-portal PR: I have implemented the changes Gustavo requested during the Brussels sprint, and after a few goes got a green tick from the spread tests (there are a few unstable tests in the suite, but they don’t seem to be related to my changes). Now I just need to get this landed.
Remaining work before we can start recommending portals to app developers is making sure they’re installed on people’s systems by default. So: backports of xdg-desktop-portal{,-gtk} to bionic and xenial, and adding them to the seeds.
gtk2-common-themes:
This is a new snap provide theme data to GTK 2 apps (and other toolkits that can reuse GTK 2 themes such as Electron 1.x, and Qt 4.x).
It isn’t being integrated into gtk-common-themes because GTK 2 themes depend on native code “engines”, and also so it will only need to be installed for legacy apps.
I’ve structured the snap with two slots: gtk-2-engines providing the engines, which can be added to $GTK_PATH in the plug snap, and gtk-2-themes containing the usual /usr/share/themes hierarchy.
While the gtk-2-themes slot can use the same technique as gtk-common-themes to allow third party themes to be plugged beside the default provider, it isn’t obvious how to achieve this for the engines given GTK 2.x’s lookup rules. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing, given that we’re talking about native code being dynamically linked into other people’s applications.
Todo: publish to the store along with a demo app (probably gtk-demo) and write about it on the Snapcraft forum.
Poked Debian X team to get xvfb working out of the box in Debian for clutter/mutter/libepoxy build tests.
Prepared gnome-remote-desktop in Debian NEW queue. For this to get in Ubuntu, we’ll need a MIR for pipewire to enable the feature and a MIR for gnome-remote-desktop if we want it installed by default. We’ll need this if we want remote desktop by default in Wayland.
It looks like next cycle, we’ll be switching from gtksourceview3 to gtksourceview4 in main since gedit & gnome-calculator are being ported upstream. (Despite the name, it’s still gtk3.)
firefox
chromium
libreoffice
snaps
other