They are getting ready to sync new packages from Debian

Oct 27, 2017 20:40 GMT  ·  By

Development of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) is kicking off slowly this week, with Canonical preparing to sync new packages from the Debian Testing (Buster) repositories.

Ubuntu Desktop Director Will Cooke shares some information about what Canonical's plans are for the next LTS (Long Term Support) release of Ubuntu, which is scheduled for release on April 26, 2018. As expected, they'll focus mostly on stability and reliability, but it looks like there will be some new features added as well during the development cycle of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

"At this early stage in the development cycle we’re spending a week or so tidying up the loose ends from 17.10, SRUing the important fixes that we’ve found, getting ready to sync new packages from Debian," said Will Cooke in his latest weekly report. "As you know, 18.04 will be an LTS release and so we will be focusing on stability and reliability this cycle, as well as a few new features."

Here are the latest improvements for Ubuntu

To improve the overall stability and reliability of the OS, Canonical will have to fix a lot of annoyances from the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) release, which hit the streets last week on October 19. This week, the Ubuntu devs managed to fix crashes for GNOME Shell extensions and the GNOME Online Accounts panel in Settings.

They also fixed a crash in the Printing indicator, improved AppIndicator support for Qt apps, which apparently disappeared after suspend and resume, and addressed a crash related to the Ubuntu Dock panel in Settings. A memory leak was also fixed in the Mutter window and composite manager for the GNOME desktop environment.

Other than that, they wrote patches to improve font rendering in the GNOME Shell panels, as well as to allow XWayland to report core dumps, and helped upstream to add generic sandboxed app support to Mutter. On the other hand, the Snappy team prepared new Snaps for the LibreOffice and Chromium apps. Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will probably ship with GNOME 3.28 by default.