Hello everyone,
My apologies for the late update – I’ve only just managed to get around to it now. We have our internal mid-cycle review next week and I will be on summer leave shortly after, as such, my next engineering update will likely be towards the end of August.
For those who might have missed it, we’ve had a lively discussion on evolving the installation options from the conventional Full or Minimal versions to a single Slim configuration. You can catch up on that discussion here. If you’ve run a recent nightly build, you may have noticed the Full and Minimal disappear, however, we are also refining the installer screens so stay tuned for more updates.
Conferences
Several team members are away this week for KDE Akademy and next week for GUADEC. If you’re attending GUADEC do not miss @till-kamppeter‘s workshop Your app everywhere, just in a Snap. Also, we’ve coordinated with the organisers to avoid any overlap with the session on creating and flatpak’ing a GNOME app. Also we have a few team members presenting as well so do say Hi if you recognise them!
Printing
@till-kamppeter is preparing the CUPS Snap for 23.10 and Core Desktop. Here are some highlights:
- When CUPS is classically installed, the “cups-control” plug connects to it; otherwise, it establishes a connection with the CUPS Snap.
- We’ve received a bug report for Core, discussed it, and @jamesh submitted a PR for snapd.
- We’ve added versioning to the Printer Application Snaps of OpenPrinting and made the first promotion to the stable channel, gearing up for 23.10.
- “Ubuntu-23.10” branches were established for all the six OpenPrinting Snaps to facilitate their inclusion in 23.10.
- We’ve managed to implement a security fix for Ghostscript (upgraded to upstream version 10.01.2, addressing CVE-2023-36664).
Distro
- We’ve rolled out GNOME 42.9 for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
- GNOME shell and Mutter 44.3 are nearly done with testing for Ubuntu 23.04.
- libadwaita 1.3.3 has been integrated into Ubuntu 23.04, significantly enhancing its accessibility support.
Firefox
@bandali landed Firefox 115.0.2. We are gearing up to transition Firefox’s base snap from core20 to core22. The changes facilitating the switch for Beta and Nightly versions to core22 have been approved, and we intend to proceed with the same for the Firefox 116 stable release, expected in the last week of July.
In addition, @bandali issued a Call for Testing for Firefox core22 builds. We invite users — particularly those using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS — to evaluate Firefox builds that leverage core22 as the base snap and report issues or regressions.
More Mantic
- We’ve elevated the C++ bindings for GTK 4 to the main category.
- Rust GTK4 0.5 and GTK3 0.16 have been successfully integrated into Mantic (as well as Debian Testing).
- Cairo has been updated to the 1.17 development series for Mantic (the Cairo developers will soon release the new stable 1.18 version).
- We’re contemplating revising the default 2-finger click/tap touchpad behaviour – or more accurately, we aim to remove our settings override. Please refer to LP #2024135 and the Poll: How do you right click on a clickpad to contribute your insights.
That’s all for this update. Feel free to ask anything in the comments section, and I look forward to reconnecting with you in a few weeks.
Kind regards,
Tim
Director of Engineering | Ubuntu Desktop