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

Posted by msmash on from the up-next dept.

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.

8 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. What the what? by honestmonkey · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    --
    Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
    1. Re:What the what? by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

      "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.

  2. How many hundreds of megabytes is Chromium... by greenwow · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  3. No user directory encryption? by ctilsie242 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  4. Still got SystemD and Amazon Integration. by xack · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Still got SystemD and Amazon Integration. by Sesostris+III · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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).

      --
      You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
  5. Translation: by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
  6. What difference does it make? by yusing · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --

    "You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson