Canonical Shares Desktop Plans For Ubuntu 18.10 (ubuntu.com)

Canonical's Will Cooke on Friday talked about the features the company is working on for Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" cycle. He writes: We're also adding some new features which we didn't get done in time for the main 18.04 release. Specifically: Unlock with your fingerprint, Thunderbolt settings via GNOME Control Center, and XDG Portals support for snap.

GNOME Software improvements
We're having a week long sprint in June to map out exactly how we want the software store to work, how we want to present information and to improve the overall UX of GNOME Software. We've invited GNOME developers along to work with Ubuntu's design team and developers to discuss ideas and plan the work. I'll report back from the sprint in June.

Snap start-up time
Snapcraft have added the ability for us to move some application set up from first run to build time. This will significantly improve desktop application first time start up performance, but there is still more we can do.

Chromium as a snap
Chromium is becoming very hard to build on older releases of Ubuntu as it uses a number of features of modern C++ compilers. Snaps can help us solve a lot of those problems and so we propose to ship Chromium only as a snap from 18.10 onwards, and also to retire Chromium as a deb in Trusty. If you're still running Trusty you can get the latest Chromium as a snap right now. In addition, Ubuntu team is also working on introducing improvements to power consumption, adding support for DLNA, so that users could share media directly from their desktop to DLNA clients (without having to install and configure extra packages), and improved phone integration by shipping GS Connect as part of the desktop, the GNOME port of KDE Connect. Additional changelog here.

Comments

Oh good

[bobstreo]

A new bunch of features to deal with.

I used MiniDLNA for a while (when I was using a SONY PS3 as a media player, and it worked pretty well. I can't imagine DLNA support is really much of an accomplishment in 2918.

Re:Oh good

[thegarbz]

I can't imagine DLNA support is really much of an accomplishment in 2918.

Typo aside I'm looking forward to 2918, maybe DLNA actually works smoothly by then. I have a mixture of open and closed source DLNA servers, players, and renderers in my house. I'm sure that one seeing the other is based entirely on some random number generator in each.

Their website says "13 YEARS AND FOUR BILLION DEVICES LATER". A good accomplishment, but I'd be happy enough if even 2 of those devices would actually just work. Zero Configuration Networking has to be the flimsiest concept invented since the first "election promise".

What the what?

[honestmonkey]

I've been a programmer for a long time. Bunch of different languages, mostly Unix or Linux, some Windows. "If you're still running Trusty you can get the latest Chromium as a snap right now." Is that even English? Or what?

Re:What the what?

[tepples]

"Trusty" is Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, codename "Trusty Tahr", released in 2014-04 and supported until 2019-04.
"LTS" is long-term supported versions of Ubuntu, which receive security updates for five years.
"Chromium" is a web browser published by Google with all the proprietary parts stripped out.
"snap" is a packaged application distributed by the Ubuntu store, which runs in a container to isolate its dependencies.

Translation: If you're still running Ubuntu 14.04, you can get the latest Google web browser as a self-contained package.

How many hundreds of megabytes is Chromium...

[greenwow]

going to be? IIRC the VLC snap was 190 MB download and about 700 MB on disk.

Re:How many hundreds of megabytes is Chromium...

[Thelasko]

Between Snaps, Unity, and Systemd, it's like Canonical is trying to clone Windows 8.

Re:How many hundreds of megabytes is Chromium...

[Anonymous Coward]

And worse are the security problems because you have to wait until the snap is updated rather than just a shared library.

No user directory encryption?

[ctilsie242]

Looks like Ubuntu 18.x doesn't offer user home directory encryption anymore. Not sure how good/bad/ugly this is, but I thought it to be a useful feature.

Re:No user directory encryption?

[PvtVoid]

You can still download and run encfs. It just isn't supported by default.

Still got SystemD and Amazon Integration.

[xack]

Ubundows 10 still not for consumption by serious Linux users. Plus playing with all this "snap" nonsense instead of plain .deb files.

Re:Still got SystemD and Amazon Integration.

[HiThere]

Well, is snap packages actually do run in a good sandbox, it makes some sense. That would make it a lot safer to install packages from sources you don't really trust. And it would limit the damages that mistakes could cause. They should also be easy to remove, with all their requirements, configurations, etc. And it could allow packages with conflicting requirements in configuration to co-exist.

That said, snap packages are clearly inferior to a deb when it comes to required install space. And a sandbox is no panacea...as the recent snap that installed a e-coin miner demonstrated.

Re:Still got SystemD and Amazon Integration.

[Sesostris III]

I'm using 16.04 LTS and will do the standard upgrade to 18.04 LTS once 18.04.1 comes out. I'll ignore 18.10 and wait until 20.04 LTS to upgrade again after that.

I'm not sure what a 'serious Linux user' is, but clearly I'm not one. However, "snap" sounds great with regards running new software on an old(ish) system without worrying too much about dependencies (or dependency conflict). Also, although I'm clearly not a 'serious Linux user', I think even I will be able to disable/remove any 'Amazon Integration' should I so wish. (And SystemD comes with Debian, and is not specifically an Ubuntu thing).

Translation:

[Gravis Zero]

We can and will make this Linux distribution worse! ;)

Gnome is too buggy

[MichaelSmith]

After the gnome team made such a big deal of their fresh start with gnome 3, I was surprised years later that gnome was still full of bugs. I used it for a few weeks after ubuntu ditched unity, then changed to xfce. I didn't see anything in the article about fixing bugs . Its all about new features, so I won't be going back to gnome.

And that means I need to migrate from Ubuntu.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Still got SystemD ...

And that means support for the last non-systemd LTS will expire while all the remaining supported LTSes use systemd (or at least use it by default).

Which means I can't stay with Ubuntu, and have to migrate, to avoid systemd.

It's been a nice ride, guys. Thanks. But goodbye/

What difference does it make?

[yusing]

Two years after 16.04, 18.04 arrives. Perceptible *useful* differences, as far as I the end-user can tell?

Miniscule. Again.

So while I'm glad the boys and girls are enjoying their fine-tuning experiences, in my experience, upgrades to 16.04 would have sufficed. The rest basically boils down to make-work.