Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: June 9, 2017

GNOME

We’ve made the decision to switch to using GNOME Display Manager (GDM) instead of LightDM. We had planned to try LightDM, and based on our investigations it became apparent that we would need to invest a considerable amount of time making changes to get everything to work correctly, more time than we have. We will be working on adding guest session support to GDM, although this might not be completed in time for 17.10 it will be a feature of 18.04 LTS.

Lots of work has been going on at the fractional scaling hackfest in Taipei. You can read the daily journal here, and we’ll publish a summary once Marco is back home.

Snaps

We’ve been debugging issues with themes in desktop snaps and found a bug. This is being fixed and we will be publishing new documentation about how to use
the desktop launchers. The GNOME 3.24 platform Snap is now published in the store edge channel. This allows the developers to build smaller GNOME Snaps. This will allow people to run the latest GNOME apps on Xenial.

QA

We’re working on testing infrastructure so that we can run our tests on a variety of physical hardware using MAAS and TestFlinger. This will give us testing across computers with Intel, AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. This work will be essential in testing Wayland support.

Updates

• BlueZ 5.45 is uploaded to Artful, but pending in proposed. This new version should resolve a lot of issues with high quality audio over Bluetooth.
• Chromium dev is updated to 60.0.3112.7, stable is now 59.0.3071.86.
• LibreOffice is updated to 5.3.3 in Artul.

News

A report on the fractional scaling hackfest from OMG