Desktop Team Integration Squad Updates – Monday 30th September 2024

[vanvugt]

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.

Last week’s notes are here: Desktop Team Integration Squad Updates – Monday 23rd September 2024

[vanvugt]

• Lots of bug triage and user support in Launchpad and upstreams. Backlog stats are here.
• Reviewed and verified the newly proposed Nvidia phantom displays fix from Alessandro.
• Reviewed Marco’s dock color fixes again and merged.
• The Xilinx Mali startup crash fixes landed upstream for Mutter 47.1.
• Uploaded Mutter 47.0-1ubuntu3 for Oracular to unblock the path to Xilinx re-enablement on Noble.
• Proposed a large cleanup of our Nvidia udev rules in gdm. Not something I wanted us to do this late in the cycle but there was a regression reported and I could see more are possible if we kept the old patches around.
• Drafted roadmap items for 25.04.
• Wrote a fix for inset box-shadow paths used for focus highlights in gnome-shell. Corners are currently rendered too thick which you can notice as early as the login screen. The fix landed upstream in line for GNOME 48.
• The SRUs from two weeks ago are now released to Noble updates: mutter and gnome-shell.
• Verified reverse PRIME (Nvidia as primary GPU with monitors also connected to Intel as secondary) now just works in 24.10 Wayland sessions. That was a surprise.
• Work in progress investigating Nvidia-560 performance issues.

[jbicha]

• Helped with fixing seeds for some Ubuntu desktop flavors for Ubuntu 24.10 Beta, particularly Ubuntu Cinnamon. Flavors are required to ship a beta to be included in the final release so this was critical work.
• We switched the default renderer for gtk4 4.16 for Debian and Ubuntu 24.10 to ngl instead of vulkan. ngl was already the default for gtk 4.14 (and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS). In particular, the Nvidia drivers aren’t ready yet for gtk4’s vulkan renderer. We won’t change this decision for the lifetime of Ubuntu 24.10 as we have reached the point in Ubuntu’s release cycle where we need to stabilize.
   
• Updated the gstreamer packages to 1.24.8 for Ubuntu 24.10
• Sponsored a cairo fix for PDF printing and exporting to Debian and Ubuntu 24.10
• Helped with getting the new major versions of webkit2gtk and librsvg to migrate out of oracular-proposed
• Several other packaging fixes and updates as we approach Ubuntu 24.10 Final Freeze later this week

In other news

• Alessandro bisected the pipewire change that broke sound on login for many users and cherry-picked the resulting fix so that sound will work well for Ubuntu 24.10
• Magpie, a fork of Mutter, was accepted into Debian which will unlock getting Budgie Desktop installable again in Debian Testing
• Hurricane Helena disrupted my work last week as I lost home power for more than a day, but I’m much more concerned about people elsewhere who had far more severe impacts than I did.