14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical won't drop support for their Ambiance theme for the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark), so they announced today that they're currently working on making it look just right with the GNOME desktop environment.
As you are aware, Ubuntu 17.10 is shipping with the GNOME desktop by default, and Canonical's Will Cooke reports today on the latest developments the Ubuntu Desktop team did for the upcoming release, saying that "Further theme fixes have been made in Artful to get GNOME Shell and Ambiance looking just right."
They also managed to update GNOME Terminal, which has been the default terminal emulator in Ubuntu Linux for the past several years, making it easier for users to create custom terminals. Additionally, the GNOME Software package manager received an update to display promoted Snaps from the Snap Store.
NetworkManager 1.8 is coming to Artful Aardvark
Will Cooke also reveals that Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) is getting the latest NetworkManager 1.8 network connection manager, though users will have to wait a few days until it lands in the repos due to some last minute fixes the Ubuntu Desktop team needs to implement for the program to work as expected.
Some desktop theming issues that users reported when running Snaps also appear to have been fixed for all supported Ubuntu release, and it looks like Canonical's James Henstridge is working hard these days to enable Snaps to work with Portals. An xdg-desktop-portal proof of concept demo is available here.
"There were some file sharing changes needed in snapd in the “Unity7” interface (which will need renaming) and these are now merged. More fixes to the desktop launcher scripts were done to provide further default theming, and these were added to the GNOME Platform Snap as well," explains the developer.
On the software stack side of things, Ubuntu 17.10 has received Chromium 59.0.3071.86, Chromium 60.0.3112.24 Beta and Chromium 61.0.3124.4 Dev, BlueZ 5.45, and Evolution 3.24 from the GNOME 3.24 Stack. Meanwhile, Canonical is working on its LivePatch client UI, which will be implemented in the Software Properties tool.