Desktop Team Integration Squad Updates – Monday 7th October 2024

[jbicha]

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 30th September 2024

[jbicha]

• Google released their color emoji font update for Unicode 16 yesterday. This has already landed in Ubuntu 24.10 and will be backported to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS later. Note that the GTK emoji chooser and the Characters app haven’t been updated yet as they depend on part of the Unicode 16 update (CLDR) that won’t be released as stable until later this month.
• The initial package for the Ptyxis terminal app landed in Debian Unstable and Ubuntu 24.10
   
• Alessandro figured out a fix for several of our GNOME packages that failed to build in our local sbuilds but built ok in the official Debian buildds so I’ve uploaded that fix for those packages. I don’t understand why the official Debian buildds are installing ca-certificates if it’s not being installed in our local minimal build environment.
• Uploaded Nathan’s autopkgtest fixes for highway. The autopkgtests now pass on all Ubuntu architectures except for i386. The i386 error is strange.
• Uploaded Matthias Geiger’s enablement of Vala support in the libpeas2 package
   
• Our late libspelling MIR was approved so I updated gnome-text-editor to use the system copy of libspelling instead of our temporary vendored copy
• Updated mozjs128 and mozjs115 in Debian and Ubuntu 24.10 for this week’s Firefox ESR updates. 115 should have been end of life already but Mozilla extended support through March for old Windows and macOS versions only; however, the source code is still released so we are able to package security updates a bit longer than expected.
   
• Packaged the gtk4 4.16.3 update. We also temporarily included a fix in Debian for the cursor size being too large in Plasma but the fix was incomplete, making things worse for GNOME, so it had to be dropped.
• Fixed a bunch of issues for the freerdp2 package. However, I don’t intend to do any more freerdp2 uploads as we’d like to remove it in favor of freerdp3. KDE is the most significant remaining user.
• Updated Ubuntu 24.10’s copy of osinfo-db with the expected download URLs for Ubuntu 24.10.
• Miscellaneous other uploads in preparation for Ubuntu 24.10’s release later next week

In other news

• Alessandro packaged adwaita-icon-theme-legacy for Ubuntu 24.10 and Debian. This package restores icons that were previously included in adwaita-icon-theme.

[vanvugt]

• Lots of bug triage and user support in Launchpad and upstreams. Backlog stats are here.
• Finished testing Nvidia-560-open - no noticeable differences compared to the closed kernel driver.
• Debugged and uploaded a fix for fractional scaling not working in 24.10.
• Started a bug audit to identify unfinished unstarted SRUs with the desktop-needs-sru tag.
• Finished profiling and triaging the Nvidia-Wayland performance issues, splitting them into multiple tasks. The main problem will require either a new Nvidia driver or a redesign of triple buffering in GNOME 48 to work around the current Nvidia behaviour. Though if that happens then other (particularly non-Mesa) drivers would get a performance improvement.
• Continued updating the 24.10 release notes.
• Revised the shell_app_dispose crash fix down to a bare minimum to get it merged upstream.
• Benchmarked the proposed Nvidia hybrid (dual GPU dual monitor) optimizations coming in GNOME 48 (mutter!4015, mutter!4027). Both are performing great but we’ll need at least one more optimization in GNOME 48 before Nvidia Wayland hybrid performance is a solved problem.
• Sponsored the Noble update for restoring Xilinx Mali support.
• Making good progress to resolve the last remaining bug in the GNOME 48 frame clock redesign.
• 25.04 roadmap planning.