Ubuntu Desktop weekly update – 16th March 2018

We’ve had a busy few weeks, and so this email is a roll up of what’s been going on in Desktopland.  Last week we had a team sprint in Budapest where we got to work side by side with our teammates and colleagues across Canonical.  Feature Freeze has now passed and we’re working on fixing as many bugs as we can.  We still have some additional features to land, and so we will be requesting Feature Freeze Exceptions for those.  Meanwhile, here’s a recap of what’s been going on:

GNOME

• We’ve proposed a branch upstream to add support for synaptics as well as libinput to Mutter.
  • https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/merge_requests/37
  • Related to this, libinput 1.10 was uploaded to Bionic
• We’ve landed a raft of fixes for jittery touchpads upstream:
  • https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=103572
  • https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105246
  • https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=105264
  • https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=793755#c2
• We’ve landed a fix for GNOME Clocks crashing in to Bionic
• We’ve updated Mutter and GNOME Shell in Bionic. Due to some holidays upstream we missed Feature Freeze, and so got an exception to land this one.
• We’ve proposed some branches upstream to integrate recently used files into Nautilus and GNOME Shell for distros that are not running Tracker
• We’ve had some fixes merged upstream for GNOME Online Accounts
• We’ve got a PR upstream for helping to protect against broken third party extensions which could prevent a user logging in to their session.
• We’ve agreed with the Community Theme team that we won’t ship it by default in 18.04, but that we will make it easily installable for people who want to test it, and will move over to it in the 18.10 cycle.

General

• 16.04.4 LTS point release was released, rolling up a number of updates, security fixes and a new kernel and graphics stacks.  Softpedia covered the point releases here.
• The Ubuntu GeoIP service (used, for example, by the installer to guess where you are in the world) now supports HTTPS, and so we’ve ported some services over to use it.
• Packages have been updated to allow Telepathy to be dropped from main.
• The changes for the minimal desktop install have landed in the installer.

Snaps

• Support for themes in snap applications is moving ahead and you can read more about the current state here.

Updates

• Chromium
  • 64.0.3282.167 published to {artful,xenial,trusty}-{security,updates}.
  • Updated stable to 65.0.3325.146 (in bionic, built in PPA for trusty, xenial and artful and awaiting testing)
  • Pushed 65.0.3325.146 snap to candidate channel and issued call for testing
• Libreoffice
  • Promoted 6.0.1 snap to the stable channel.
  • Published 6.0.2 (RC) snap to the candidate channel, and issued call for testing
  • Backports for CVE-2018-6871 published to xenial and trusty

In the news

The Ubuntu Podcast has an interview with Will Cooke in this week’s episode, talking about 18.04 LTS.