14 DAY TRIAL // GNOME Project's GUADEC (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) developer conference is now over, and Canonical's Didier Roche was there to collaborate with the GNOME team for the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 release.
It's no news that Canonical decided to bury its excellent Unity user interface and switch back to a default GNOME desktop environment experience for upcoming Ubuntu releases, and Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) will be the first to offer fans of the popular Linux-based operating system these major changes.
And it finally looks like Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop team now has a clear direction after the GUADEC conference, deciding to make some modifications to the vanilla GNOME desktop environment, such as enabling an always visible dock by default via the widely-used Dash to Dock GNOME Shell extension.
But they decided to use a slightly modified Dash to Dock add-on instead of the original one, which users can install from the GNOME Extensions website if they want more features. The well-known Ambiance GTK theme and Ubuntu font will be enabled by default, too, along with the Wayland session.
"We are going to use an always visible dock-like experience as a GNOME Shell extension by default," said Didier Roche, Ubuntu Desktop Technical Leader at Canonical, in a blog article. "We are going to switch over Wayland by default on [Ubuntu] 17.10. The X.Org session will still be available alongside."
Application control buttons are moving to the right, again
Among other exciting changes that are coming to the Ubuntu 17.10 release later this fall, there are the move of the application control buttons (minimize, maximize and close) to the right side, which might confuse long-time Ubuntu users, and there will be more GNOME apps installed by default.
There's still no word on with what default apps Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) will ship pre-installed, but will let you know as soon as we hear anything. It also looks like users will be able to use the upstream vanilla GNOME desktop environment instead of Canonical's modified one.
All these changes are coming to Ubuntu 17.10 daily builds in the next few weeks, and we look forward to the Ubuntu 17.10 Beta release, which will hit the streets at the end of the month, on August 31. After that, the Final Beta is expected on September 28, and Ubuntu 17.10 launches officially on October 19, 2017.