14 DAY TRIAL // Don't know if you recall, but we told you that Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system, is working on a packaging more GNOME apps as Snaps for Ubuntu and other Snappy-enabled distros.
Well, it turns out that they've been working on a Platform Snap for the recently released GNOME 3.26 desktop environment, which should allow users of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system to run the latest apps from the GNOME 3.26 Stack as Snaps, as well as developers to package their apps as Snaps.
"We’ve been working on a Platform Snap for GNOME 3.26 to allow you to run the latest GNOME apps on Xenial as well as making Snaps for the new apps," reveals Will Cooke, Ubuntu Desktop Director at Canonical, in his latest weekly report. "This should be ready for testing soon and we’d appreciate some feedback."
Snaps will soon be able to access system fonts and font caches
Will Cooke also said the Snappy team is working hard these days on enabling more desktop specific features on the Snapd daemon, which should hit the stable repositories soon on all supported Ubuntu Linux releases, as well as any other GNU/Linux distribution where Canonical's Snappy technologies are supported.
These upcoming Snapd changes should allow Snap apps to automatically access the fonts and font caches of the host system, but only if they use the new Desktop interface. In the meantime, the Snappy devs want you to try out the latest LibreOffice 5.4.1 office suite release as a Snap on Ubuntu.
As for Ubuntu 17.10, it will be shipping next month with the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment by default, highly customized by Canonical to make the transition for Unity users to GNOME a breeze. The Final Beta will be available for download next week, on September 28, though, if you want to get a first glimpse at the new release.