Desktop Team Updates - Monday 16th August 2021

[robert.ancell]

Hi everyone, below you will find the updates from the Desktop team 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 Updates - Monday 9th August 2021

[robert.ancell]

• Created a project to track Fluter Linux integrations.
• Reviewed ubuntu-desktop-installer PRs.
• Transferred our Dart packages to the new canonical.com verified publisher.
• Fixed D-Bus sequence numbers, which was causing Flutter programs to fail inside Flatpaks (a D-Bus proxy was checking the numbers more closely than the D-Bus server).
• Implemented D-Bus authentication on Windows.
• Responding to reviews on Dart socket file descriptor messages.

[jibel]

• Automating the submission of WSL apps to the MS Store.
• Helped other engineering team with the creation of customized images.
• Stats for OEM.

[vanvugt]

• Lots of bug management in Launchpad and upstreams. [Backlog stats]
• The desktop-icons-ng startup fix landed upstream in gnome-shell 41. Also in impish-proposed now, thanks Laney.
• Testing Nvidia 470: Wayland support is still disabled by default so you need to boot with nvidia-drm.modeset=1 and comment out a line from /lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules. But at least GLX apps are hardware accelerated now (on impish only). The full bug list is here.
• Triple buffering progress:
  • Found and fixed a smoothness bug specific to the Nvidia driver.
  • Work in progress on Wayland multi-monitor support (Xorg is perfect already): fixed a couple of crashes and a freeze but still see some flicker.
  • Started on better downclocking support from triple to double buffers.
• Proposed a plan to revert back to the old GNOME login animation, which might make sense when ubuntu-dock is loaded in GNOME 40/41. Although upstream has rejected the option for now so modifying extensions to use it is not an option.
• Fixed a theoretical bug in: Avoid missing/broken app launch animations. It’s still needed even in GNOME 41.

[jpnurmi]

• Desktop Installer

  • Implemented conditional routing for Turn Off RST & BitLocker
  • Implemented a dialog UI for creating partitions
  • Reviewed and merged the Turn Off BitLocker page
  • Finalized the Turn Off RST page
  • Design & looks: updated Yaru and adapted to changes, corrected dropdown looks, and implemented desktop-style check and radio buttons according to the design specs

• Subiquity Client

  • Added RST and BitLocker queries

• WSL Setup

  • Added support for command line arguments
  • Localized and configurable Window title
  • Intermediate step with multiple entry-points (abandoned)
  • Moved on to a hard split with a shared package for common parts

[oSoMoN]

firefox

• discussed details of building a firefox snap from source in Launchpad with Mozilla
• prepared 91.0 stable update and handed over to the security team, now published to all supported releases
• there is now a 91.0.1 release candidate, preparing builds for it
• requested auto-connection in the store for the system-packages-doc interface

thunderbird

• uploaded 91.0 to impish, needs an archive admin to accept the NEW binary packages
• triaged and investigated bug reports about window persistence on wayland (also reported upstream)

chromium

• updated stable to 92.0.4515.131
• updated beta to 93.0.4577.42
• updated dev to 94.0.4603.0
• commented on an upstream CL touching snapcraft.yaml

Ubuntu Desktop Installer

• reviewed and merged a handful of pull requests

other

• endorsed Martin’s MOTU application

[till-kamppeter]

• CUPS Snap: Waiting for @ijohnson’s pull request on snapd for the cups printing interface to get merged by the snapd team.
• cups-filters: Tested several CUPS backends in their new harness, the filterExternalCUPS() filter functions and fixed some issues, especially of the printer device URI being supplied both as environment variable and as command line argument 0, also sanitized the URI where needed so that contained passwords do not appear in logs.
• Retro-fitting of classic CUPS drivers into Printer Applications: Continued on the driver retro-fit library code. Completed the CUPS backend support! This was the last major feature for the printer driver retro-fit library, now only smaller things have to be done. One can now add printers discovered by the CUPS backends included in the Printer Application package, print on them as usual, poll information from the printer (if the backend supports side and back channels), and so classic CUPS printer drivers which come with a CUPS backend can get easily retro-fitted, too.
• Ghostscript: My reported bugs raster-only PDF and PCLm output need seekable output device and No back side orientation support for duplex printing with “pclm” output device got both fixed upstream now.
• Google Summer of Code 2021: Continued mentoring the students. Got pull requests for pdftoraster() made PPD-file-independent and bannertopdf() converted into a filter function.
• OpenPrinting: Monthly video meeting and August news post, with Ubuntu Indaba announcement right on the top.
• Bugs.