Ubuntu Desktop weekly update – 16th March 2018

Will Cooke

on 16 March 2018

This article is more than 7 year s old.


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

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.

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