14 DAY TRIAL // Soon after it entered Feature Freeze development stage on August 24, 2017, the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system is yet to receive a polished and final default desktop session which resembles that of previous releases running Unity.
As you are aware, Ubuntu 17.10 is launching next month with the latest GNOME desktop environment by default, as Canonical decided to drop development of the Unity user interface, which was built by them on top of the GNOME Stack. Therefore, they put together a "Fit & Finish Hackfest" event to fix some theming issues.
Last month, Canonical's Will Cooke said in a weekly report that the Ubuntu Desktop team is working hard to set up the default Ubuntu GNOME Shell session to be capable of co-existing with the standard, vanilla GNOME Shell session that can be added by users at any moment after installing the operating system.
Here's the default GNOME Shell theme of Ubuntu 17.10
Ubuntu contributor Didier Roche announced earlier today that the new GNOME Shell theme is ready for deployment, and that it's based on the second Beta release of the forthcoming GNOME 3.26 desktop environment, due for release on September 13, 2017. You can see what the default GNOME Shell theme and lock screen look like in the screenshot gallery below.
"We are based on GNOME Shell 3.25.91 (upcoming GNOME 3.26), which presents, for now, a transparent top panel until you have an application touching it," said Didier Roche. "We followed thus that trend, knowing that there are upstream discussions around readability issues due to lack of real blur and the upstream GNOME team may revert that change before 3.26 final. We will follow whatever decision taken there."
Therefore, the final look and feel of the default Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) session might suffer some minor changes until its final release later next month. Until then, Canonical is still working on improving the captive portal support for NetworkManager, as well as Bluetooth, video, audio, and printing improvements. The Final Beta of Ubuntu 17.10 is expected at the end of the month, on September 28, 2017.
