Desktop Team Updates - Monday 25th 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 18th April 2022

:mega: Ubuntu 22.04 is now released

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:earth_africa: Late fixes for the Jammy release

  • Fixed a bad gdm upload that broke Wayland
  • Sponsored and mentored Heather’s gnome-shell-extension-manager 0.3 packaging (including the new text-engine library)
  • xdg-desktop-portal 1.14.3 uploaded to fix crashes affecting TeamViewer’s Wayland support (you’ll need the preview channel for the feature currently)
  • Updated GNOME Tweaks to
    • allow it to be installed without installing GNOME Shell
    • not depend on the (older) GNOME Shell Extensions app
    • drop the not-very-helpful notice that Tweaks doesn’t manage GNOME Shell extensions any more
  • squeekboard 1.17.1 to fix an onscreen keyboard scaling issue
  • Disabled the 3D Acceleration experimental feature in osinfo-db. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and Debian Testing were showing a black screen in the GNOME Boxes and virt-manager apps because of a broken virtio driver or something. Will file a bug report and investigate more but this workaround helps a lot.
  • Some release note updates

:earth_americas: Prepared these Stable Release Updates for 22.04 LTS

:earth_asia: Other Debian/future Ubuntu work

  • Joined the libvirt packaging team to update some of the GNOME Boxes dependencies (not libvirt itself)
  • Had gnome-control-center and gnome-shell recommend power-profiles-daemon for the Power Mode feature
  • ghex update which was the final push to remove nemiver

:earth_africa: Updating osinfo-db upstream for the new 22.04 LTS release

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Desktop Installer

  • Updated subiquity and adapted to storage v2 API changes

yaru.dart

Other

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GNOME HUD extension updates

  • Made hardware loading asynchronous
  • Reorganized the preferences window
  • GNOME System Monitor can be opened from the indicator popup menu
  • Added network query code, not yet implemented
  • Various bug fixes
  • Working on lots of configuration options for hardware monitors
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WSL

Testing the latest builds and landing last-minute bug fixes to the underlying projects:

  • Prevents potential bugs due change in WSL behavior between OS versions;
  • Prevents the installer to be launch with PWD pointing inside anywhere in Windows FS;
  • More specific error codes;
  • Enhanced the command line interface to better integrate with the new installer experience;
  • Better control of the GUI windows;
  • Fixed Subiquity autoinstall for WSL;
  • Small polishments in the WSL installer Flutter GUI.
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  • I am in Italy from Thursday on, for LAS 2022
  • CUPS Snap: snapd 2.55.3 has been promoted into the stable channel! So now we have finally a working version of the cups snapd interface. So I officially launched it with this post on snapcraft.io containing a description of the differences between the cups-control and cups interfaces, instructions on how Snap developers have to use it, and how the interface actually works. So everyone of the Snappers under you, please use the cups interface as described here for any application which has print functionality. It allows secure printing and auto-connects when the Snap is downloaded from the Snap Store. @mvo, @ijohnson, @jamesh, @pedronis, @alexmurray, @mardy, Sergio J. Cazzolato, and Michael Sweet for the great collaboration on the design, implementation and testing of the cups interface.
  • cups-filters: continued with fixes and enhancements towards the cups-filters 2.x release: Started to do the restructuring toremove the PPD file support completely from libcupsfilters and move it into libppd, making libppd depending on libcupsfilters and libcupsfilters not depending on libppd. Created a first wrapper filter function ppdFilterPDFToPDF() calling cfFilterPDFToPDF() with the latter not having PPD file support. I let the PPD file loader function directly translate the PPD file into printer IPP attributes for the call of the original filter function in libcupsfilters now and I am currently creating a function to extract the requested paper size dimensions from job IPP attributes and options. This will be the last major code change before the release.
  • Retro-fitting Printer Application Snaps: In all the 4 driver-retro-fitting Printer Applications I use the current GIT master again as PAPPL 1.2b1 got released by Michael Sweet and several new features added.
  • Canon CR3 RAW support in Ubuntu: Answered user question on DPReview.
  • Ubuntu Desktop Team Indaba with Mark Shuttleworth: Commented that Mark did not mention that with Snap you can also package system-daemons and I made heavily use of it and with the Printer Applications one can distribute distro-independent hardware driver packages. Mark (@sabdfl) gave me a Thumbs-Up for that!. Made the same comment on the OMGUbuntu article about the Indaba and I got an up-vote from Popey, the guy who wants to move us to all-Flatpak!! And thanks, @hellsworth and @madhens for this great Indaba!
  • Linux Application Summit 2022: Continued planning for the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release party. The virtual release party and the in-person release party are scheduled now. Also worked out a customs problem of the shipping of our orange Canonical/Ubuntu polo shirts from UK to Vienna with Carolyn Taylor. my talk will take place on Sat, April 30 at 3:35 PM CEST and can also be watched remotely. Register as remote attendee to watch my talk or the virtual release party. And at the end of the first day (Fri, April 29) an old gray-bearded man of the Desktop Team will make an announcement.
  • Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin: The OpenPrinting micro-conference got accepted!!
  • GUADEC 2022 in Guadalajara, Mexico: My talk proposal “The New Architecture for Printing and Scanning - What GNOME/GTK Developers Need to Know” got accepted!! So I will have my first GUADEC this year!!
  • Google Summer of Code 2022: Sorted out some problems with Google’s new web app and mentor registration.
  • Bugs.
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  • spent some time catching up with things after holidays
  • updated the ubuntu-installed icon in ubiquity for the logo refresh
  • debugged plugins not working anymore in shotwell
  • updated the thunderbird snap to 91.8.1
  • sponsored a gnome-control-center SRU for the oem team
  • ISO testing for the LTS release
  • launchpad reports triaging
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Took Wed off

  • Finished text-engine and gnome-shell-extension-manager changes. A huge thanks to @jbicha for being an amazing mentor and uploader! We got it in Jammy just in time for the release! It did take way more time than I had planned for it though.
  • Lots of WSL interviews
  • Indaba with Mark. Thanks to @madhens for cohosting and @bwyazel for doing the ops stuff!
  • research for my LAS talk

I’m in Italy all this week for vacation + LAS.

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firefox24 firefox

  • On the beta branch, enabled LTO and PGO when building the snap for amd64 (this is impractical on armhf and arm64 where it either fails to link or takes forever to run the instrumented application through the profile generator). With this combined set of build-time optimizations, I’m seeing a visible performance gain which takes the performance of the snap very close to that of unconfined upstream builds.
  • addressed another round of review comments on my native messaging portal patch

chromium22 chromium

  • updated beta to 101.0.4951.41
  • updating dev to 102.0.5005.12

package24 other

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