Will Cooke
on 15 December 2017

Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update – December 15th 2017


This article is more than 7 year s old.

Here’s the last newsletter for 2017, we’ll be back in the new year. On behalf of the whole Desktop Team I wish you all a happy holiday and a peaceful 2018.

GNOME

Some important fixes landed in fonts-noto-emoji.  🍔  🍺 🧀

Work continues on removing as much gtk2 as we can. A fresh 18.04 install now only installs three gtk2 rdepends: Firefox, Thunderbird and libgtk2-perl (for debconf). Firefox 58 (in beta) has dropped the gtk2 dependency.

Found and fixed a shadow offset bug in gtk+ related to the fraction scaling work.

General

The MIR for spice-vdagent is progressing. This adds some nice features to guest systems running with GNOME Boxes such as copy-and-paste between host & guest and arbitrary screen resolution support.

We’ve ported our Selenium autopackage tests for Chromium over to Firefox as well. This makes a wider range of automatic integration tests available to Firefox.

Avahi: We received the patch for advertising services on localhost. It is actually a one-liner! Courtesy of Rithvik Patibandla one of the GSoC 2017 Open Printing students. 18.04 will ship the complete driverless printing fun, including USB.

We’re looking for more help to verify the Unity 7 fixes. If you can spare an hour or two please see this thread for more info.

Snaps

A couple more upstream projects have merged our snapcraft.yaml files in to their trees. You can see the current state of the GNOME snaps we are maintaining here.

Updates

  • Chromium
    • Updated chromium beta to 63.0.3239.84 and updated snap in beta channel
    • Updated chromium dev to 64.0.3282.14 and updated snap in edge channel
    • Updated chromium stable to 63.0.3239.84 (all supported series + bionic-proposed), snap in candidate channel
  • Libreoffice
    • Promoted 5.4.3 snap to stable channel

Newsletter
signup

Get the latest Ubuntu news and updates in your inbox.

By submitting this form, I confirm that I have read and agree to Canonical's Privacy Policy.

Related posts


Daniele Procida
30 June 2025

How to get a job at Canonical

Article People and culture

If you’re interested in applying for a role at Canonical, it can help to have some insider guidance. A lot has been written on social media about Canonical and our hiring processes. Some of it is even true. I share responsibility for what we do, because I am a hiring lead at Canonical. Hiring leads

Daniele Procida
30 June 2025


Rajan Patel
27 June 2025

How is Livepatch safeguarded against bad actors?

Article Security

What safeguards the Livepatch security patching solution against bad actors and malicious code masquerading as an update? Learn about Secure Boot and module signing.

Rajan Patel
27 June 2025


Giulia Lanzafame
26 June 2025

Accelerating data science with Apache Spark and GPUs

Article Data Platform

Apache Spark has always been very well known for distributing computation among multiple nodes using the assistance of partitions, and CPU cores have always performed processing within a single partition.  What’s less widely known is that it is possible to accelerate Spark with GPUs. Harnessing this power in the right...

Giulia Lanzafame
26 June 2025