Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: September 22, 2017

We’re less than a week away from Final Beta! It seems to have come round very quickly this cycle. Next week we’re at the Ubuntu Rally in New York City where we will be putting the finishing touches to the beta. In the meantime, here’s a quick rundown on what happened this week:

GNOME

• The release of GNOME 3.26 last week meant lots of package updates in 17.10. Thanks Jeremy for leading the charge on this.
• More work is happening on the progress bars in Dash to Dock.
• We’re working on a fix for a bug which shows your desktop for a few seconds when resuming from suspend. This affects Unity and GNOME Shell.
• We’ve made a few more tweaks to GDM, and you can now see the Ubuntu logo at bottom of the greeter.
• Some new additions to Didier’s series of blog posts on the transition to GNOME Shell covers alt-tab behaviour
  • https://didrocks.fr/2017/09/14/ubuntu-gnome-shell-in-artful-day-12/
• And the transparency settings for Dash to Dock:
  • https://didrocks.fr/2017/09/20/ubuntu-gnome-shell-in-artful-day-13/
• The new wallpaper and mascot were released.

Snaps

We’ve been working on a Platform Snap for GNOME 3.26 to allow you to run the latest GNOME apps on Xenial as well as making Snaps for the new apps. This should be ready for testing soon and we’d appreciate some feedback.

Some desktop specific updates to snapd are also in the going to be rolling out soon; Snaps using the new Desktop interface will automatically get access to host system fonts and font caches.

Updates

• Chromium 61.0.3163.79 is ready for publication. Chromium beta updated to 62.0.3202.18 and dev updated to 63.0.3213.3 for all series except Trusty.
• Libreoffice 5.4.1-0ubuntu1 now in Artful.

In The News

• OMG talks about the changes to the Dock.
• Dustin Kirkland presents the results of the app survey at UbuCon Paris.