14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop director Will Cooke is back this week with another update on what's going on with the development process of the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system.
It looks like Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop and Snappy teams are putting a lot of effort lately on packaging as much GNOME apps to the Snap universal binary format as possible, by using the gnome-3-24 platform Snap they created recently. With this, they want to make possible the sharing of common libraries between GNOME apps, which automatically translates to smaller Snaps and easy maintenance of them.
"We’ve been packaging more GNOME apps as Snaps using the gnome-3-24 platform Snap," said Will Cooke, Director, Ubuntu Desktop, Canonical. "By utilizing the content interface in Snaps, we can share the common libraries between GNOME apps, which means the apps themselves are smaller and the maintenance of the core libraries can happen in one place, and be shared by all the Snaps using it."
GDM replaces LightDM, hardware-accelerated video playback still in works
They also managed to promote the LibreOffice 5.3.4 Snap to the stable channel. In other news, we were the first to report a week ago that Canonical replaced the LightDM login manager with GNOME's GDM on Ubuntu 17.10, and now the latest daily builds come with GDM (GNOME Display Manager) by default. Canonical now also confirms the change, and they promise to make the transition seamlessly for users by doing regular tests to make sure everything works as expected.
They also managed to make transparent terminals work properly, under the Wayland display server, and continued to work on the promised hardware-accelerated video playback for Intel GPUs by fixing various issues with gstreamer-vaapi, Totem (Videos), Clutter, and other components. The good news is that 4K H.265 playback works well on modern Atom chips like Apollo Lake or Cherry Trail, as well as cheap Braswell notebook chips.