Also has media sharing, fingerprint unlocking, new installer

May 18, 2018 16:40 GMT  ·  By

Work on the Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) already started, and today the Ubuntu Desktop Director Will Cooke gave us a first glimpse of what to expect from the final release of the operating system later this year.

As you can imagine, Ubuntu 18.10 will come with a lot of new features and improvements, some of which Canonical planned for a long time but didn't manage to implement them in the recently released Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system due to its long-term support status and the focus on stability and reliability.

So, like any other 9-month supported release, Ubuntu 18.10 will be a testbed for Canonical to try new things. Some of these include the ability to unlock your Ubuntu desktop with a fingerprint reader, integration with the KDE Connect Android app by default through GS Connect, a new installer, and a new system theme.

"Mark recently proposed that we investigate how we could improve the desktop installer by looking at what has been done to move the server installer forward.  This is a complex topic and will take more than one 6 month cycle to complete, but we’re going to be starting our investigations," said Will Cooke in his latest blog post.

Power consumption and media sharing improvements, GNOME updates

One of the most exciting things coming in Ubuntu 18.10 is the optimizations Canonical wants to add in an attempt to offer users much-better power consumption by tweaking any low-level kernel options for switching off HDD and USB controllers, as well as other devices that aren't in use, without sacrificing the stability of the system.

To improve media sharing and Ubuntu's compatibility with smart devices using the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) protocol, Canonical wants to make it easier for users to share media content directly from their desktops, as well as to easily create SMB (Samba) shares, another feature that will be integrated into the desktop.

Snap support will see a lot of improvements as well in Ubuntu 18.10, starting with XDG Portals support and continuing with the start-up time of Snap apps. Canonical also plans to make the open-source Chromium web browser available only as a Snap beginning with the Cosmic Cuttlefish release.

Last but not least, Ubuntu 18.10 will feature all the great improvements from the upcoming GNOME 3.30 release, which will be the default desktop environment, including improvements to the GNOME/Ubuntu Software graphical package manager and implementation of Thunderbolt settings via the GNOME Control Center.

Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) is slated for release on October 18, 2018. Canonical dropped the Alpha 1 & 2 and Beta 1 milestones for this development cycle, and replaced them with so-called Testing Weeks. The first such Testing Week will be available for public testers as soon as next week, from May 21 to May 25, 2018.

Ubuntu 18.10 with Communitheme
Ubuntu 18.10 with Communitheme

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