Desktop Weekly Newsletter - 10 November 2017

Desktop
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The big news this week is the availability of Bionic daily ISOs: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/

As always, we’re beavering away on the desktop:

GNOME
We’ve started a conversation on the GNOME mailing list to talk about locking down extensions which are part of a “mode” (a set of compulsory extensions and other settings). Ubuntu ships a mode to implement the default session - with some extensions including the Ubuntu Dock. Should an update to one of these extensions be published elsewhere, for example on extensions.gnome.org, the session will use the updated extension. It’s intended that these come from the system and are subject to the distribution’s QA processes - there is obvious potential for breaking a lot of systems if this isn’t followed. Our proposal is to always load the system installed version of a mode’s extensions. We have a proof of concept patch to enable this which is being tested.

We’ve rebased the Ubuntu dock on Bionic and uploaded it.

Fixes for blurry fonts and Xwayland crash dumps and system monitor have landed upstream:

A security fix for zesty for a lockscreen bypass issue when auto-login is enabled was released.

Updates

  • PulseAudio 11.1 has been merged from Debian for Bionic.
  • Chromium 62.0.3202.75 is published to all supported series. 62.0.3202.89 is currently building in the stage PPA. We also updated Chromium beta to 63.0.3239.30 in PPA and snap beta channel.
  • The LibreOffice stable channel snap is updated to 5.4.2.

Snaps

We’ve created a snapd interface to allow access to GNOME Online Accounts, and this will allow us to package confined apps which need to access G-O-A. This is still in testing, but we will make an announcement when it’s ready for user testing.

In The News and On The Hub

There is a lively discussion about Tracker on the hub.
The Free Software Showcase (aka The Wallpaper Competition) is discussed.
A community led theme for 18.04 is kicked off.
OMG covers colour emoji support

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