Representatives from the Ubuntu Flavors along with various Canonical and community leads met on March 13th 2023 to discuss the upcoming release of Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster among other desktop and flavor developments:
- Oliver Smith (@local-optimum ) talked about great focus on the upcoming flutter-based installer. This new installer uses subiquity as a backend, which is the same installer used by Ubuntu Server. Oliver also mentioned that Ubuntu is providing downloads for both the new, subiquity flutter-based installer, as well as the older ubiquity installer.
- David Mohammed (@fossfreedom ) from Ubuntu Budgie has been working with @jpnurmi to enable the new subiquity flutter-based installer on Ubuntu Budgie 23.04. He is also writing notes and will be happy to publish those as soon as the process is completed and well documented.
- Sebastien Bacher (@seb128) mentioned UI freeze and default wallpaper. For more information on Lunar Lobster release schedule, please visit this post by @bdmurray.
- Tim Holmes-Mitra (@timhm) Introduced himself. Tim joined Canonical recently as Engineering Director (Desktop).
- Lukas Zemczak (@sil2100) Noted that Ubuntu MATE daily build has been failing since December 2022. Rik Mills (@acheron) found the issue. Package conflicts between pipewire and pulseaudio. Erick Eickmeyer (@eeickmeyer) confirmed the issue, and posted detailed instructions on the fix on Ubuntu MATE Discourse. Martin Wimpress (@Wimpy) is working on a fix. Many flavour team members mentioned their availability to help Ubuntu MATE with testing.
- Flavour team members discussed the option to promote an additional round of testing during Beta, to further polish the release.
- Philipp Kewisch (@kewisch) Proposed joint announcements and started a discussion on how we can coordinate better around testing week to increase efficiency and increase cooperation. Main takeaways were to do testing more often, and get information on areas to test from flavors in advance.
- Simon Quigley (@tsimonq2) Mentioned that Lubuntu is planning experimental Wayland support using Wayfire, a compositor that LXQt is starting to support. Plans are for either 23.10 or later releases. Jeremy Bicha (@jbicha) provided detailed instruction on the path forward for uploading to Debian and resolving package conflicts .
- Erich Eickmeyer (@eeickmeyer) mentioned that updated Studio Controls could not be shipped on Lunar Lobster, and a workaround to switch to regular pipewire was implemented. Erich also mentioned that changes in how low latency kernel is built are causing some problem with the testing phase of Ubuntu Studio.
- Erich Eickmeyer (@eeickmeyer) announced that Edubuntu is back as an official flavour.
- Joshua Peisach (@itzswirlz) is confident that Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix will obtain official flavour status before beta. Joshua mentioned that Lukas Zemczak (@sil2100) is helping with cd image/livecd-rootfs. Joshua also noticed some issues with Firefox on Cinnamon, and briefly discussed the issue with Jeremy Bicha (@jbicha).
- Ken Gilmer from Regolith is focusing on testing Wayland. He plans to release new version of Regolith, around one month after Ubuntu Lunar Lobster release.
Ubuntu Flavor Sync Meetings take place every 2 months on the second Monday of that month. There are two sessions, 3PM UTC and 10PM UTC, to best accommodate our global community. All are welcome to join and participate in the discussion!