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 the Community Hub (this site).
We also have our weekly meeting on IRC. We meet on Tuesday at 13:30 UTC in #ubuntu-desktop on Freenode. There will be an “Any Other Business” section at the end where you are welcome to raise topics. These topics might be discussed during the meeting, or afterwards depending on the time, depth of conversation, topic and so on.
disco: Fix still in upstream review though it sounds like they don’t want it. To design a different fix and investigate all the related leaks in gnome-shell would take several weeks, which is not something I am willing to commit to right now. It’s not an important enough bug… although figuring out how to debug future JavaScript leaks might make it worthwhile. Maybe distro patch?
open ppa for having a successful build of our canary image for eoan.
read grub doc for features we would need (multi-line or titles). Title -> hardcoded, helper text: hardcoded and refresh like terminal, timeout -> refreshed internally… No good option for now
read documentation and request access to github actions for our CI we’ll put in place on ZFS related projects.
cups-filters: cups-browsed was still deleting manually created queues (Bug 1731417). Fixed upstream.
cups-filters: Clean-up of compiler warnings
Google Summer of Code 2019: We got all the requested 12 slots from Google for the Linux Foundation, meaning that all the 5 students we recruited for OpenPrinting will be able to do their projects.
OpenPrinting: Planning for participation in Linux Foundation’s Plumber’s conference in Lisbon this year.
Published snapd PR #6767, which is a work-in-progress branch adding support for snaps installing themed icons (e.g. to install an app icon to hicolor that can be overriden, or to provide their own theme-appropriate variant icons).
The branch has some basic unit and spread tests, but still has a few todos:
handle parallel installed snaps, including rewriting the icon line in corresponding desktop files.
remove empty directories from the shared icon tree on package removal/upgrade.
One piece of initial review feedback was about validating the icons before copying them to the icon directory. I hadn’t looked at doing this in the initial implementation because the same concerns exist for the existing way of referencing icons in desktop files.
The topic is not quite accurate: snap apps can be controlled via MPRIS, but the Spotify app in particular sets the wrong value for the DesktopEntry property, leading to a sub-optimal experience on KDE.
This is something that the snap could correct (at least if we ignore parallel installs).
The long term answer to this might be to give snaps more control over their desktop file IDs, since this is not the only instance of the current naming causing problems. It’s not obvious what the new system should be though.
Gnome Shell performance (
Revised, redesigned, retested, resolved discussions and fixed conflicts in various upstream proposals:
A couple of performance fixes were released to 18.04 this week as part of an SRU pair to mutter and gnome-shell. See below.
Release bugs:
bionic: Unblocked by the above SRU, but 
bionic: Not started. I want to catch up on mutter performance work before returning to bionic SRUs.
Good news (falling backlogs): xorg-server, xorg, firefox, chromium-browser, totem
Bad news (consistently growing backlogs): ubiquity
Bug traffic is already back to normal so it looks like 19.04 was a very good release.
libreoffice
other
)
thunderbird
chromium
libreoffice
other
release bugs
Livepatch:
General:
Tracker: