14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop team continues to work hard on making the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system the best GNU/Linux distro with the GNOME 3 desktop environment by default.
Now that Unity is no longer the default desktop of Ubuntu for future releases, the stakes are high because there are some very popular Linux OSes out there already shipping with an out-of-the-box, well-designed GNOME desktop experience, so Canonical needs to up their game and bring as many user-requested features as possible.
One of these is the ability to raise the volume over the 100% limit using the keyboard volume buttons of your laptop. Ubuntu always had this features, but it's not available in the vanilla GNOME desktop environment, nor on other GNOME-based distros, and it's a must have for laptop users, because it's a pain in the neck to access the System menu, open the Control Center, and then the Sound panel to increase the volume over 100%.
"We’ve been looking at ways to port the feature of allowing the sound to go above 100%. This is needed because some computers (e.g. Thinkpad X220) have a fairly low volume at 100% and so adding some software amplification is a useful addition," said Will Cooke, Director, Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical. "While this does already work in GNOME Shell, using the keyboard volume buttons is still limited to 100%."
More GNOME apps ported as Snaps in the Snappy Store
In the meantime, Canonical's Snappy team continues to work on packaging as many GNOME apps as possible to the Snap universal binary format for GNU/Linux distributions, and they managed to promote this week the GNOME Dictionary, GNOME Calculator, GNOME Clocks, GNOME Sudoku, and Quadrapassel apps to the stable channel, which Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) users can install.
They are also looking at ways of adding more themes to the default desktop launcher for Snaps, but it looks like this will increase the build time and the size of Snaps. However, they promise to make theme support for Snaps work out of the box soon. In related news, the Ubuntu Desktop team continues to make hardware-accelerated video playback and captive portal support a dream come true in Ubuntu.