14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu contributor Didier Roche shares today with the community some of the last minute finishing touches that he and the Ubuntu Desktop team had to add to the forthcoming Ubuntu 17.10 release.
First of these is a mass upgrade of the GNOME Stack to the latest upstream release, GNOME 3.26.1, which introduces all the bug fixes and improvements to make the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment a reliable, mature, secure, and safe place for use in production environments. A second point release, GNOME 3.26.2, will be available after the release of Ubuntu 17.10 on October 19, 2017.
As you are aware, Ubuntu 17.10 is the first release of the popular and free GNU/Linux operating system in seven years to ship with the GNOME desktop environment by default as Canonical dropped development of its Unity user interface. Thus, the Ubuntu Desktop team needed to adapt to the GNOME philosophy and tried to drop many of the patches they used on Unity.
"With our transition to GNOME Shell, we are following thus more closely GNOME upstream philosophy and dropped our headerbar patches," said Didier Roche. "Indeed, as we previously, for Unity vertical space optimizations paradigm with stripping the title bar and menus for maximized applications, distro-patched a lot of GNOME apps to revert the large headerbar."
Ubuntu Dock gets last-minute improvements, too
For Ubuntu 17.10, Canonical had to make the GNOME desktop environment look and feel as much as possible like Unity, so they had to create a dock that resembles the Unity Launcher. The Ubuntu Dock is based on the popular Dash to Dock extension for GNOME Shell, and it recently received some last-minute improvements, too, including fixes for some glitches and unwanted behavior.
Among other last-minute finishing touches that Canonical added to the soon-to-be-released Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, we can mention fixes for multi-monitor configurations, several improvements to the Settings app, theming improvements, i18n fixes for both the GNOME Shell and Ubuntu Dock, better support for HiDPI displays, and much more noted in Didier Roche's last report.
