Desktop Team Updates - Monday 18th April 2022

Desktop Team Updates
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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 11th April 2022

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  • Review Flutter PRs.
  • Ubuntu Core desktop specification work.
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:rabbit2: Uploaded a new osinfo-db to 22.04
:egg: Added Ubuntu 22.04
:egg: Enabled express install for Ubuntu 21.10 & 22.04 Desktop
:egg: Enabled 3D Acceleration option for recent Debian & Ubuntu
:egg:Listed desktop amd64 first for recent releases so GNOME Boxes recommended downloads works as expected

:rabbit2: I had to remove GNOME OS from the GNOME Boxes 22.04 .deb recommended downloads since I couldn’t get it to boot and wasn’t able to figure what’s wrong

:rabbit2: Added a Debian/Ubuntu patch for glib to allow gnome-console to open terminal apps. This is blocked from being accepted in glib directly because the maintainer wants a more comprehensive fix. I agree that there are lots of benefits of that; it just will take time.

:rabbit2: gnome-bluetooth3 got accepted into main which allowed us to benefit from GNOME Shell’s improved bluetooth handling

:rabbit2: helped with testing, building, and discussions to get our feature freeze exception approved to backport the GNOME 42 RDP remote desktop sharing feature to 22.04

:rabbit2: helped implement a community contribution for GNOME Remote Desktop autostart that accidentally broke in GNOME 42

:rabbit2: fixed missing Canon CR3 support in Darktable for 22.04

:rabbit2:Added /usr/share/gtk-doc/ to the system-packages-doc snap interface so that we can use the Firefox or Chromium snaps to view some system docs. Will be fixed in a future snapd release soon. This was my first contribution to snapd itself.

:rabbit2: Cherry-picked fixes for several packages before Ubuntu 22.04 Final Freeze to reduce the need for SRUs later

:rabbit2: Began attending the weekly GNOME Design calls

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More GNOME HUD updates

  • Added multi-monitor support
  • Added additional settings, including overlay size, position, color, etc.
  • Setting changes now apply live
  • Overlay can now be clicked through
  • Added battery level display
  • Cut overlay update time to 1/4 the time
  • Hardware queries should be more accurate
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Took Wednesday off.
I am AFK all next week and back on May 4.

  • Ubuntu docs: participated in discussions, both with ubuntu-docs and internally. The state is that we are supposed to put new content on a discourse, but until there is a full person in the documentation role (the role that has yet to be published for application), we are not to request the needed discourse. The reason for this is an argument for proper planning and it’s not my decision. So I will work on putting stuff in help.ubuntu.com … something like help.u.c/enterprise and help.u.c/developer. And write docs in markdown/github and have the wiki pages display this. More to come!
  • LAS 2022
    • Research on local stuff for lots of additions to the website. I’ll be in Italy next week for vacation and then (April 29 and 30) where I’ll announce a fun thing :slight_smile:
    • Put together skeleton presentation and gathered feedback
  • text-engine: packaged it up like I did with the others but oh wait it’s a C package and needs a different process. Using libdazzle as an example, will finish today. Also packaged up gnome-shell-extension-manager 0.3.0 (needs text-engine) and tested it.
  • Interviews

This week my main focuses are:

  • finishing the LAS presentation, with review
  • finish text-engine packaged properly, according to debian and gnome preferences
  • gather some statistics for @local-optimum
  • write a blog post (even just a rough draft by eow) on the extension manager in ubuntu 22.04
  • outline help.u.c pages to review later in the week
  • the indaba with Mark!!
  • I plan to run the appstream.u.c charm on friday to update for JJ release on thursday and HH eol on friday
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Desktop Installer

Flutter

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  • CUPS Snap: The promotion of snapd 2.55.3 into the stable channel is planned for today! The bugs I have mentioned last week are fixed, only the problem of the “sticky” environment (you need to run snap-discard-ns on all your installed Snaps to get it update after the snapd update) still persists and I have no news from @mvo about that yet. Taking into account that you can already use the new cups interface. See instructions in my April news post.
  • cups-filters: continued with fixes and enhancements towards the cups-filters 2.x release: After having fixed the known bugs and renamed everything to have a nice API, I came to the next step: How do we have a libcupsfilters without any PPD file support to use a s distro package in a system with CUPS 3.x? But how still be able to install a (non-snapped, DEB package) retro-fitting Printer Application in such a system without needing to replace libcupsfilters by a differently built variant (is this possible in distros?) which supports PPDs, without needing a libcupsfilters generally supporting PPDs (and we all wanted to get rid of them)? So I thought out a design change in cups-filters: Currently the filter functions support PPDs, libcupsfilters depends on libppd, I will remove the PPD support from the filter functions, making libcupsfilters independent of PPDs and libppd, create wrapper filter functions in libppd overtaking the PPD support and calling the original filter function. So dependencies get reversed, libppd depends on libcupsfilters and libppd provides the PPD-supporting set of filter functions, libcupsfilters the PPD-free set, and that without code duplications. Now I am turning this idea into code. In addition I made the ghostscript() filter function output grayscale PCLm and raster PDF with appropriate jobs and/or printers and also require Ghostscript 9.56.0 in cups-filters 2.x now.
  • Retro-fitting Printer Application Snaps: Updated all the 4 driver-retro-fitting Printer Applications and the CUPS Snap to Ghostscript 9.56.1 (security fix) and also updated the HPLIP Printer Application to HPLIP 3.22.2 (Release notes) and in addition the PostScript Printer Application and the Ghostscript Printer Application to HPLIP 3.22.2, too, for contained PostScript PPDs and hpijs driver for non-HP PCL laser printers.
  • Easter Egg in Jammy - OR - Canon CR3 RAW support finally in Ubuntu!: I have read @jbicha’s update on Monday (Easter Monday) and he wrote that he has fixed libexiv2 in Jammy to actually support Canon’s CR3 RAW format, the format used by the most recent camera models. So I tried it out right away, with the files of my Canon PowerShot G5X Mark II (the small camera which I have always in my pocket, also on the Sprint in Frankfurt) and it works! In Jammy DarkTable, RawTherapee, and digiKam all open the CR3 files now and you can edit them! Also spread the news to the photo community on DPReview. Thanks, @jbicha.
  • Linux Application Summit 2022: @local-optimum has brought in the idea of having a Jammy release party on the LAS. @bwyazel, @hellsworth, and me discussed this and we came to the conclusion to make both a virtual and and a physical release party, most probably on Sat, April 29, tonight (CEST), after the conference day. Also made an announcement in the April News Post on OpenPrinting.
  • Google Summer of Code 2022: All contributor candidates who we have onboarded in the OpenPrinting community have given me their proposals for review and after my review they have submitted them to Google. If all works fine (we get enough slots, all contributors complete their projects, …) we will get most of the work done for the New Architecture!
  • OpenPrinting: Posted the April News Post. Special features this month are: LAS 2022 announcement, Updated testing and bug workaround instructions for the cups snapd interface, AppImage and Printing. Tons of fixes for cups-filters 2.0.
  • Bugs.
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WSL

  • Removed experimental systemd support from the UDI GUI variant for WSL
  • Extended the launcher command line options
  • Fixed UDI behavior not waiting for Subiquity to finish the background tasks before allowing closing the installer window (WSL only).
  • Improved slide show and OOBE GUI windows tracking and placement to ensure a smooth transition between windows during installation.
  • Revisited the slide show design to to soften the transition between it and the OOBE once ready.
  • Landed last minute bug fixes on the launcher application.
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firefox24 firefox

thunderbird24 thunderbird

  • built and tested 91.8.1 for all supported releases, and handed over to the security team for sponsoring

chromium22 chromium

  • updated stable to 100.0.4896.88 then 100.0.4896.127, and handed over to the security team for sponsoring
  • updating beta to 101.0.4951.34
  • updating dev to 102.0.4997.0
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