Ubuntu Flavor sync meeting notes: March 11, 2024

Flavors
1

Representatives from the Ubuntu Flavors along with various Canonical and community leads met on March 11th 2024 to discuss the upcoming release of Ubuntu 24.04 Noble Numbat among other desktop and flavor developments:

Introductions

Mauro Gaspari (@ilvipero) kicked off both sessions with a few reminders of the basic rules of flavor sync meetings.

  • What?
    A flavor sync meeting is a recurring meeting between parties involved in the development and release of Ubuntu and Ubuntu flavors. It happens every 2 months, therefore we have 3 flavour sync meetings for each ubuntu release. We usually have 2 sessions for each meeting, to accommodate time zones. Once a year, the flavour sync happens in person, at the Ubuntu Summit.

  • Who?
    Ubuntu Flavours, Ubuntu developers, upcoming flavours, downstreams, and anyone interested is welcome to join the flavour sync meetings. Quick note, the meetings are focused on the challenges and issues of the upcoming release of Ubuntu. In order to give everyone time to speak, we need to be aware of time constraints. If a topic appears to be very complex and time consuming, we can move it to Discourse discussion or schedule a separate meeting.

  • How?
    Ubuntu Flavor sync meetings are not streamed nor recorded. This is done on purpose to encourage honest, sometimes difficult questions and conversations. Highlights of the Flavour sync meetings are posted on the Ubuntu Discourse, to encourage ongoing conversation around the topics discussed and relevant to the development of Ubuntu releases.

Announcements

Keep in touch with the Release Team

@bdmurray would like to encourage all Ubuntu flavors to stay in touch with the release team on the IRC channel at libera.chat: #ubuntu-release

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Noble Numbat Mascot assets

Special thanks to @kewisch for submitting the exception request.

Testing week feedback

  • @tsimonq2 preparing for 2038 timestamp problem on 32bit architectures.
    • Flavor image build impacted
    • Good progress is being made, no ETA but @utkarsh will provide updates.
  • @arraybolt3 mentioned There’s an issue with Snap that only appears to affect Kubuntu that is breaking notifications for presumably all Snaps. Reported on this Launchpad bug
    • Firefox, Thunderbird, and Element snaps are all affected
    • @eeickmeyer informed us that Ubuntu Studio is affected as well. Discussion on this Launchpad bug.
  • @bluesabre reported that the new Installer working well for Xubuntu now, both minimal and regular install.
  • @bluesabre asked if OEM is in the new flutter installer .
    • @jbicha believes this feature will land later in the cycle, but recommended to check with @tim-hm on the flavor channel.
  • @eeickmeyer confirmed that RaspberryPI images are now working for EdubuntuRPI.
    • Images require addition to ubuntu-images launchpad git repository.
      *Required changes to ubuntu-image / bootstrap which are now unblocked.
    • Last little fragment of ubiquity (oem-config) needs to be used for the pre-installed images.

Mir and Miriway

@alan_g and @matthew-kosarek brought a few updates on the development of Mir and Miriway

Mir

Mir for desktop: Since last sync

  • Mir 2.16.3 (bugfix release, in 24.04)

    • Better X11 support:
    • “Do not kill X11 apps whose pop-ups don’t support WM_DELETE_WINDOW”
    • Better tiling support:
    • “Fix clip area when the layout of the texture disagrees with the layout of the output”

  • Mir (devel, post-24.04)

    • Fix clip area when rendering screenshot
    • Integration with logind session lock

Mir based desktop updates

Other updates

  • @tsimonq2 gave us a reminder of Thunderbird snap transition - affected flavors should update their seeds.
  • @jbicha asked if flavors updated fwupdater. Not done yet for Budgie, Cinnamon, Kylin, MATE, Studio, Unity.
    • MATE provided verbal approval at Riga Summit to switch from gnome-firmware.
    • Ubuntu Budgie is adding it to the budgie-welcome snap
  • @jbicha informed of GNOME Software packaging split, but it looks like only Cinnamon is currently shipping GNOME Software Bug #2056767 “DRAFT [FFe] gnome-software package split” : Bugs : gnome-software package : Ubuntu
  • @Conan_Kudo was at FOSDEM. Red Hat was running accessibility tests on various distributions such as Red Hat, and Ubuntu and its flavors . It looks like accessibility tests were failing for several Ubuntu flavours. It would be great if some effort could be put to ensure these issues are tested
    • Tim Holmes-Mitra ensured that accessibility is very high in the priority list.
    • Simon is volunteering to help flavors incorporate Orca since Lubuntu has recently added it
    • @ilvipero commented that it would be great if we could collaborate across distributions on a list of accessibility items that cover both software to be seeded, default configurations, and default keybinds.
  • Question for Foundations. DRM turned on in the kernel for 24.04? Can take this offline and continue on the matrix room.
    • @Conan_Kudo mentions: SIMPLEDRM needs to be =y instead of =m though
    • @seb128 confirmed the settings are being worked on for 24.04

Get involved!

Ubuntu Flavor Sync Meetings take place every 2 months on the second Monday of January, March, May, July, September. There are two sessions, 3PM UTC and 10PM UTC, to best accommodate our global community. The last Ubuntu Flavor Sync of each year happens happens in-person, at the Ubuntu Summit.
All are welcome to join and participate in the discussion!

2 Likes