Ubuntu Desktop weekly update – February 9, 2018

Here’s the round up from this week:

GNOME

• The default session has now been switched back to use Xorg by default.  Wayland is still installed and can be selected from the login screen.
• GNOME 3.27 has entered Freeze in preparation for the 3.28 release scheduled for March.
• We’ve landed some changes to udisks2 and GNOME Disk Utility which will hide snaps from the list of mounted disks.  This makes the Disks utility easier to work with. These changes have been accepted upstream.
• We’re working on a fix which will help improve performance when more than one monitor is connected and branches should be proposed upstream in the next week.
• GNOME Tweaks 3.27.90 has been released
• Gtk4 has landed in Debian experimental.  We will be following this closely and will report here as soon as we have any definitive plans for Gtk4.

Snaps

• LibreOffice 6 is now available for testing in the candidate channel.
• The desktop helpers scripts now have a stable branch and include fixes for using locales from the platform.
• Fixes have landed in Xenial to improve matching of launcher icons to running snaps and to allow snaps to better integrate with the Unity 7 launcher & GNOME Shell dock badges.
• Chromium
  • Update dev to 65.0.3325.31 and snap in edge channel
  • Uploaded 64.0.3282.140 to bionic, updates for {artful,xenial,trusty} ready in staging PPA, and pushed snap to the candidate channel

General

• PulseAudio 1.11 is available in Bionic and includes a couple of fixes for Bluetooth and USB audio devices.
• BlueZ 5.48 is also ready for testing in Bionic.
• A long standing bug in the installer where the disk encryption password was asked for before the keyboard locale was set (meaning that the password you entered could well be different next time you enter it, depending on your keyboard layout) has been fixed.

Pro Tip

• If you use the feature of holding down alt while clicking and dragging inside a window to move it around, under GNOME Shell that key mapping is the super key.  So hold down super (aka The Windows Key), click and hold inside a window and drag it around.

If you’d like to discuss anything in this post you can comment on corresponding post on community.sne.bianheman.eu.org.