14 DAY TRIAL // Work on the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system continues, and Canonical's Will Cooke is back with more information on the Ubuntu Desktop team bakes for the final release, which will land on October 19, 2017.
Last week, we told you that Ubuntu 17.10 will support all known driverless printing standards and that captive portal detection is now enabled by default. Also, Ubuntu 17.10 received initial support for PolicyKit authentication in the Snapd Snappy daemon, to finally allow users to install and remove Snaps from the Snappy Store without having to create an Ubuntu One account.
And now, it looks like Ubuntu Dock is getting support for indicators and notification badges. This is great news for those using apps that support libappindicators, as the soon-to-be-released GNOME 3.26 desktop environment won't ship with support for indicators. On top of that, enabling notification badge support in Ubuntu Dock is a must for ex-Unity users.
"We’re adding notification badge support to the Dock extension. This branch has been proposed to the upstream project and is awaiting review," reveals Will Cooke, Ubuntu Desktop Director, Canonical. "We’ve packaged the KStatusNotifier extension to provide support for indicators. This will provide support for apps which use libappindicators which was removed from GNOME 3.26."
Wayland session won't work on PCs with non-hybrid Nvidia GPUs
As you are aware, Ubuntu 17.10 will be using the next-generation Wayland display server by default instead of X11 (X.Org Server), which is available as an alternative from the GNOME Display Manager (GDM). But, Will Cooke warns users that the Wayland session won't work on PCs with non-hybrid Nvidia GPUs, unless they enable the experimental KMS support, which will break X11.
As such, people with this kind of systems won't see the X11 session to not end up with a broken Ubuntu installation if they feel adventurous to enable Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) for the Wayland session. Meanwhile, the Ubuntu Desktop team still works to improve the video playback performance in Ubuntu 17.10 to reduce CPU usage, and hardware-accelerated video support on Intel GPUs.
Other than that, the Ubuntu Desktop team worked to sync the mobile broadband provider info from Debian Sid. On the other hand, it looks like the Ubuntu Kernel team still works on rebasing Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) on the recently released Linux 4.13 kernel. The Final Beta is expected later this month, on September 28, and it will give us a glimpse of what's coming to Ubuntu Linux this fall.