14 DAY TRIAL // Now that they choose to ditch their powerful Unity desktop environment for GNOME, the Ubuntu Desktop development team have a lot of work on their hands testing various components and technologies that aren't quite familiar.
In his report last week, Canonical's Will Cooke revealed the fact that the Ubuntu Desktop team was working hard on implementing a testing infrastructure based on the company's MAAS (Metal as a Service) and TestFlinger technologies to test various scenarios on a wide range of physical hardware.
The new testing infrastructure appears to give the Ubuntu Desktop team access to computers using various AMD Radeon, Intel, and Nvidia graphics cards for test driving the next-generation Wayland display server for the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system with the GNOME 3 desktop environment.
"We’re working on testing infrastructure so that we can run our tests on a variety of physical hardware using MAAS and TestFlinger," says Will Cooke, Director, Ubuntu Desktop, Canonical. "This will give us testing across computers with Intel, AMD and Nvidia graphics cards. This work will be essential in testing Wayland support."
We were the first to report last week that the daily build ISO images of Ubuntu 17.10 are now shipping with GNOME as default desktop environment instead of Unity, and if you check that story again and look at the attached screenshot gallery, you'll notice that there are two sessions on the login screen, GNOME and GNOME on Wayland.
Those brave enough to install Ubuntu 17.10 on their PCs to test GNOME and Wayland are also invited to test drive BlueZ 5.45, which should fix some high-quality audio over Bluetooth bugs, Chromium 59 and 60, as well as LibreOffice 5.3.3 and Linux kernel 4.11.