New unity-session package is now included by default

Jun 24, 2017 03:41 GMT  ·  By

It looks like Unity 7 is not dead yet, as Canonical's Will Cooke is now informing the community that the Ubuntu Desktop team has been working lately on making it easier for users to install the Unity 7 session and related packages on Ubuntu 17.10.

According to his latest report, Will Cooke says that there's now a new unity-session package installed in the latest daily builds of the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, a fork of the old ubuntu-session package, to allow users to install a Unity 7 session alongside the default GNOME Shell one.

"We’ve migrated ubuntu-session to a new unity-session package. This means that the default session is GNOME Shell and people can install Unity 7 and its related packages via unity-session," says Will Cooke. "The migration is working well so far, but we still have some more work to do in order to make sure everything "just works.""

The plan for shipping a GNOME-based Ubuntu 17.10 release did not change. Canonical said that they wouldn't abandon Unity 7 so fast, and that users would still be able to install their beloved desktop environment from the main software repositories of the OS, just that there won't be any new features added to it. However, they are now preparing to replace the LightDM login manager with GDM by default.

Snaps now compatible with desktop themes, Linux 4.13, and more

In his latest report, Will Cooke also reveals the fact that the Ubuntu Desktop team managed to improve the way Snap apps look in the distribution with various of the desktop themes you may have installed. Additionally, they've been working on the new LivePatch UI implementation to add the list of kernel CVEs that are handled by the service.

On the other hand, work on enabling hardware-accelerated video playback by default in Ubuntu 17.10 continues with a new proof-of-concept that uses the latest GStreamer multimedia framework and a VA-API pipeline, resulting is a 3% CPU usage when playing H.264 4K 60FPS videos on Intel Haswell GPUs. Playing 4K H.265 HEVC videos is also possible on Intel Skylake or later processors.

For now, Ubuntu 17.10 remains based on the Linux 4.10 kernel that's being used in the current stable release, Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus), but the Ubuntu Kernel team is testing the upcoming Linux 4.12 kernel in the unstable repositories and are still targeting Linux kernel 4.13 for the final release of the OS later this year on October 19, 2017.

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Ubuntu 17.10's login screen
unity-session in Ubuntu 17.10
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