Hi everyone, below you will find updates from the Desktop team’s Integration squad from the last week. If you’re interested in discussing a topic please start a thread in the Desktop area of Discourse.
Lots of bug triage and user support in Launchpad and upstreams. Backlog stats are here. Also spent time with Mauro discussing ways to boost community involvement in bug tracking.
Set up Raspberry Pi for a Noble graphics health check. GNOME 46 is looking good, but there’s corruption in some apps on Xorg (regardless of GNOME version).
This is a very busy week for the team as we prepare for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Feature Freeze in a few days.
The python 3.12 transition completed, allowing many of our GNOME 46 Beta apps to migrate out of noble-proposed.
I created initial packaging of GNOME Shell 46 Beta and uploaded it to a PPA. If you are patient, these packages will be uploaded to noble-proposed in a few days. If you are impatient, I’ll warn you that the Ubuntu Dock extension has known serious bugs including breaking the Activities Overview.
We completed the Poppler 24.02 transition in Ubuntu. (This will also be done in Debian, but major transitions are paused there until after the 32-bit time transition lands)
The only package in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS using the old webkitgtk 4.0 is the old installer Ubiquity. We will likely either drop the use of webkitgtk there (affects the timezone map) or actually remove Ubiquity from Ubuntu completely before Ubuntu 24.04 LTS’s release.
Debian is also getting close to completing its removal of webkitgtk 4.0 with the last 2 packages in Testing scheduled for automatic removal next week.
I packaged GNOME Terminal 3.52 Beta. There is an initial release (3.97.0) of a GTK4 version of GNOME Terminal but it will not be used for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS because it has some regressions compared to the stable GTK3 version.
I updated the tracker & tracker-miners packages for Debian Experimental and fixed some build issues that had prevented it from being uploaded to Debian Unstable or Ubuntu earlier. Still a few issues to resolve.
Many other packaging updates for GNOME 46 Beta and more
I recognized that we won’t be able to get JPEG XL support into Ubuntu Desktop’s default install for 24.04 LTS, but there is still time to get the library updated in Universe so that the gdk-pixbuf support is available for install.
My initial msgraph packaging is landing in Ubuntu now. We will try to get this into the default Ubuntu install for Microsoft OneDrive integration similar to the existing Google Drive support in the file browser powered by GNOME Online Accounts.
I proposed dropping games from Ubuntu Desktop’s full install.
In other news
The Rust GTK packages for GNOME 46 are being staged in Experimental for upload to Debian and Ubuntu soon
GStreamer 1.24 RC is also being staged in Experimental and will be uploaded to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS this week.