The distro will ship with the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment

Aug 11, 2017 19:22 GMT  ·  By

Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop Manager Will Cooke just informed the community about the latest things the Ubuntu Desktop team is working on for Ubuntu 17.10.

As reported earlier in the week, Canonical's Alan Pope put out a call for testing for the Ubuntu Desktop team to be able to finish the Unity to GNOME Shell transition on the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, and they've prepared a lot of changes that should see the light of day in the coming weeks. These include an always visible dock and application control buttons on the right.

Besides those features, they also re-implemented the "Power Off" option in GNOME Control Center that the user can enable as an action to trigger shutdown when the power button is pressed. Canonical's Will Cooke reveals the fact that the option will be implemented in in GNOME Control Center 3.25.90 (3.26 Beta), suggesting what we thought from the start, that Ubuntu 17.10 is shipping with GNOME 3.26.

Video acceleration, audio, networking and Bluetooth improvements

But it looks like Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop team is also working hard to improve the video acceleration by attempting to fix a bunch of memory leaks in the Chromium 60 web browser for Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) to enable video acceleration by default. For now, the latest patches that they added showed a 50 percent saving in CPU usage when using VA API on Intel hardware.

Among the latest networking improvements that are about to land in Ubuntu 17.10, we can mention patches to allow users to enable or disable the Network Connectivity Checker via new toggle switch that should be implemented in the Privacy panel of GNOME Control Center. Audio support was improved as well as the PulseAudio sound system was made lighter by removing Android support.

"In Pulse Audio we’ve dropped some more patches for Android support (from Ubuntu Touch) bringing us more inline with upstream. This will make maintenance easier and should reduce the chance of bugs cropping up from our patches," said Will Cooke, Ubuntu Desktop Manager, Canonical. "Our patches to add enabling and disabling of the Network Connectivity Checker are in review upstream."

The audio enhancements in Ubuntu 17.10 continue with the inclusion of an alternate toolbar for the default music player, Rhythmbox, offering users a tidier user interface for the player. Lastly, the Ubuntu Desktop team managed to update a bunch of packages to their newest versions from the Debian Unstable repos, as well as to upgrade more GNOME apps and components to GNOME 3.26 Beta.