Ubuntu Desktop weekly update – 22 January 2018

Here’s an update on what we’ve been working on over the last couple of weeks:

GNOME

We’ve been working on a patch for udisks to hide snaps from applications such as GNOME’s Disks.  This will hide all loop devices, including installed snaps, from disk management utilities making it less confusing and less cluttered.  We’ve reworked the patches a couple of times to align with the upstream developers suggestions and are still working on a few bugs.  We hope that this will be merged upstream soon.

There is a bug where window titles are not correctly aligned when you have the dash-to-dock extension installed and the dock visible.  We’ve upstreamed a fix and are working with the GNOME team to agree the best route forward.

We’ve also been working with GNOME’s design team on some new sound options for Settings and Tweaks to add support for increasing the volume level above 100%.

Theme

Developers have been very busy on the community driven theme and it’s looking really sharp!  You can follow along on the community hub.  Massive thanks to everyone working on the community theme.  Keep an eye out for Didier’s blog post to get a good view of what’s coming.  We’ve also been working on the tidy up of the existing theme with input from the Canonical design team, the community theme developers and Canonical developers.  You can see the issues that are being addressed here.

Elsewhere in the GNOME stack we’ve been working on a bug where Wayland apps became unresponsive to mouse clicks and done work to improve the responsiveness of touchpads.

Updates

BlueZ 5.48 has been updated and is in a PPA for testing.

The LibreOffice snap is updated to 5.4.4.  Please test and give us your feedback.

General

We’ve started our investigation in to boot speed and are using systemd’s features to do some profiling.  This will help us to identify and bottlenecks and get Bionic to boot as quickly as we can.

We’ve found and fixed an issue in Network Manager’s connectivity checker packaging.

We’re continuing work on moving the user session over to systemd.

Printing

Cups-filters 1.19.0 was released.  This has taken over all new functionality from the driverless PPD generator of CUPS to the one in cups-filters, fixing color space/color depth determination in PPD generator.  And in cups a bug has been fixed to resolve 16-bit high color depth in Apple Raster (AirPrint printers, most common driverless printing type).