Hello,
On Friday we wrapped up Pulse 19 
I must share that I’m happy with our progress this cycle and humbled by the wider efforts of everyone involved in delivering the beta. Yes, release is still a few weeks out, and so this might feel premature, but many of the major features and changes we wanted to land have landed and so it’s a worthy milestone to acknowledge.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll be focused on bug fixes, polish and correctness. So if you have the time to test we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Following that we’ll be gearing up for our in-person sprint and planning for 24.04 and onwards.
</preamble>
GNOME 45
Those of you on running an up-to-date mantic should now be enjoying GNOME 45 Rīga. To find out more you can find the release notes here.
App Center
Our new App Center continues maturing. This sprint saw the introduction of deb support which I know many of our users were concerned may not make it into Mantic. Additionally, the code for our new ratings implementation did land as well although there is still work ongoing in the background to stand up the API. Once the API is live then ratings should automagically appear.
Finally, the Flux team will be focused on polish and bug fixes over the next few weeks so do expect the AC to continue maturing.
The Desktop Installer
In August our fantastic Desktop Installer engineering lead moved onto other opportunities and this brought resource constraints into sharp focus on the Flux team especially as we worked to get the App Center ready for Mantic. I am currently working through this problem as I have grand ambitions for overhauling provisioning in 24.04 forward. I’ll share more when I have more to share. Resource constraints aside we have made a few enhancements to the installer of this pulse:
- For those of you looking to test our hardware backed encryption solution you may have noticed more actionable feedback messages.
- ZFS has returned!
- And finally, we changed the default installation from Full to the new Default.
Here’s what these changes look like:
DebConf23, Opportunity Open Source and 
@till-kamppeter’s back from India, where he helped run the Opportunity Open Source conference in the IIT Mandi. Head over to Ubuntu OnAir Streams to catch up on some recordings. Following Opportunity Open Source @till attended DebConf23 and spoke about the new printing architecture in Debian. You can watch that here. Finally you can find the cups-filters 2.0.0 release notes here and the OpenPrinting newsletter here.
Core Desktop
We’ve made important strides in improving the desktop experience. Desktop-launch now handles local files and URLs more efficiently, and we’re on the brink of completing the transition to Ubuntu Welcome (a new flutter-based out of the box experience).
Gaming
Gaming enthusiasts will be happy to hear that we’ve fixed a containment issue with the Steam snap. You can read more about that here.
Closing
One last admin point from me. Going forward, I’ll aim to get these updates out the Monday after a pulse ends because it’s a squeeze to publish them before the weekend.
Kind regards,
Tim