Some of the apps are from the GNOME 3.22 Stack

Apr 13, 2017 10:57 GMT  ·  By

As part of today's Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) release, the Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 official flavor made its appearance online as well, so we can now have an in-depth look at its new features.

Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 is the first release of the flavor to ship with an up-to-date GNOME Stack, based on the recently released GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, which is a major update introducing numerous novelties, such as Night Light, a cool feature to protect your eyes by automatically reducing the blue light emitted by your computer's screen.

You'll have to check out our in-depth GNOME 3.24 release article to get yourself familiar with all the new features of the desktop environment, so you know what to expect from Ubuntu GNOME 17.04, though some of the apps are from the previous GNOME 3.22 Stack for stability, such as Nautilus, Evolution, Terminal, and Software.

"Several apps are no longer installed for new installs, but will not be automatically removed from existing installs: Brasero (a CD burning app), Evolution (email suite), Seahorse (GPG and SSH key management app), xdiagnose (display troubleshooting app). These apps are still available for install in the Software app," said the devs.

Flatpak support installed by default, experimental Wayland session

Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 comes with Flatpak support installed by default in case you want to use certain apps packaged as Flatpaks, and it also includes chrome-gnome-shell, which provides GNOME Shell integration for the Google Chrome web browser. Additionally, the Tracker search indexing engine is now sandboxed.

The gnome-icon-theme package is no longer installed by default as the default icon theme is GNOME's Adwaita, and gconf was removed since it's been superseded by gsettings for some time now. Various new GNOME apps are available for installation, though, including GNOME Recipes and GNOME Games.

As expected, Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 offers an experimental Wayland session, which can be selected by the user from the login screen. Default session remains the X11 one for this release, as Canonical hopes to make the switch to Wayland by default next year with the release of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

Also worth mentioning is that the GNOME Shell 3.24 user interface uses the SpiderMonkey (mozjs) 38 engine, which appears to require a stricter JavaScript syntax. This means that some of your existing GNOME Shell extensions might not work well and you'll need to update them if available.

Under the hood, Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 is powered by the same internals as its bigger brother, Ubuntu 17.04. These include the Linux 4.10 kernel, Mesa 17.0 graphics stack, and X.Org Server 1.19 display server. Swap files are now used instead of swap partitions for new installations, and systemd-resolved is the default DNS resolver.

Apps like LibreOffice 5.3 and Mozilla Firefox 52.0 are installed by default, and you can download Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) right now from our website for either 64-bit or 32-bit computers. This release will be supported by Canonical for nine months, until January 2018. Check out the screenshot gallery below to see Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 in action!

Preinstalled apps - Part 1
Preinstalled apps - Part 1
System applet
System applet
Powered by Linux kernel 4.10
Powered by Linux kernel 4.10

Ubuntu GNOME 17.04 (11 Images)

Ubuntu GNOME 17.04
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