Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update – December 15th 2017

Here’s the last newsletter for 2017, we’ll be back in the new year. On behalf of the whole Desktop Team I wish you all a happy holiday and a peaceful 2018.

GNOME

Some important fixes landed in fonts-noto-emoji.  🍔  🍺 🧀

Work continues on removing as much gtk2 as we can. A fresh 18.04 install now only installs three gtk2 rdepends: Firefox, Thunderbird and libgtk2-perl (for debconf). Firefox 58 (in beta) has dropped the gtk2 dependency.

Found and fixed a shadow offset bug in gtk+ related to the fraction scaling work.

General

The MIR for spice-vdagent is progressing. This adds some nice features to guest systems running with GNOME Boxes such as copy-and-paste between host & guest and arbitrary screen resolution support.

We’ve ported our Selenium autopackage tests for Chromium over to Firefox as well. This makes a wider range of automatic integration tests available to Firefox.

Avahi: We received the patch for advertising services on localhost. It is actually a one-liner! Courtesy of Rithvik Patibandla one of the GSoC 2017 Open Printing students. 18.04 will ship the complete driverless printing fun, including USB.

We’re looking for more help to verify the Unity 7 fixes. If you can spare an hour or two please see this thread for more info.

Snaps

A couple more upstream projects have merged our snapcraft.yaml files in to their trees. You can see the current state of the GNOME snaps we are maintaining here.

Updates

• Chromium
  • Updated chromium beta to 63.0.3239.84 and updated snap in beta channel
  • Updated chromium dev to 64.0.3282.14 and updated snap in edge channel
  • Updated chromium stable to 63.0.3239.84 (all supported series + bionic-proposed), snap in candidate channel
• Libreoffice
  • Promoted 5.4.3 snap to stable channel