Since the Color Emoji feature was mentioned in the most recent Desktop Weekly Newsletter, let’s show you how you can try it now.
This requires Ubuntu 18.04 (which is still in early Alpha)
There are two color emoji fonts easily available.
Emoji One / Emoji Two
The Emoji One font will be used by default in Fedora 27 which will be released later this month. Because the Emoji One developers decided to only release new versions of Emoji One under a license that forbids modification and re-distribution, the font has been forked as Emoji Two. Emoji Two is not yet ready to be packaged by LInux distros so we’re still using the last version of Emoji One before the licensing change.
From a terminal, run:
sudo apt install fonts-emojione
Noto Color Emoji
The Noto Color Emoji font is the emoji font used in the latest stock Android devices such as the Google Pixel phones. Although an official decision has not been made yet, it looks like this is the emoji font that will be included by default with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
This new package has to be manually approved by the Debian ftpmaster team before it will be available in the regular archives. But if you don’t want to wait, you can download it from the Ubuntu Desktop Transition PPA.
If you have both Emoji One and the Noto fonts installed, in my testing the Emoji One font is used except for emoji that Noto provides that Emoji One does not.
Then What?
I recommend installing the GNOME Characters app to easily browse emoji.
Optionally, you can enable emoji search in the Activities Overview by using the Settings app. Just open Settings > Search and turn on Characters.
In most apps using GTK, you can right-click in a text field and select Insert Emoji to get an emoji chooser. If the app you’re using doesn’t have that option, please file a bug. I already filed one for gedit.
What’s Next
- After the Noto Color Emoji font is in Ubuntu, we’ll need to file a bug to request that it be moved to main. Packages in main are officially supported by Canonical. A package must be in main before it can be included by default in Ubuntu. The bug requests for this process are called MIR bugs.
- We already have a MIR bug for GNOME Characters to replace the older Character Map (gucharmap).
- Once those MIRs are approved, we can add them as recommends from ubuntu-desktop to include them in Ubuntu by default.
Debian
This work is also being done in Debian. Debian doesn’t yet have fontconfig 2.12.6 which is required for the color emoji feature to work well. It also doesn’t have the Emoji One font. It might make sense to just wait for Emoji Two to be packageable instead of packaging the old version of Emoji One.
I think I’ll personally install 
! That kind of small feature isn’t a “big” thing but help to have a more polished experience, imho.
