14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Will Cooke published a new Ubuntu Desktop newsletter today to inform the community on the development progress of the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system.
Besides various improvements for the GNOME desktop environment, the Ubuntu Desktop team over at Canonical recently started to investigate the boot speed of the Ubuntu Linux operating system, planning to give it another boost by using systemd’s latest features to do some profiling, which will help them identify any issues that might cause slow boot up time.
"We’ve started our investigation into boot speed and are using systemd’s features to do some profiling. This will help us to identify and bottlenecks and get Bionic to boot as quickly as we can," says Will Cooke, Ubuntu Desktop Director at Canonical in the community announcement. "We’re continuing work on moving the user session over to systemd."
Theme, NetworkManager, GNOME, and printing improvements
Apart from the boot speed improvements, Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop team have discovered and fixed an issue in NetworkManager’s connectivity checker packaging, as well as to release CUPS-Filters 1.19.0, which addresses CUPS's color space and color depth determination in the PPD generator functionality and fixes a bug to resolve 16-bit high color depth in Apple Raster.
In addition, various theme enhancements were made to improve the responsiveness of some Wayland apps to mouse clicks, and great progress was made on the new design. The Ubuntu Desktop team is also working closely with the GNOME devs to add support for increasing the volume level above 100 percent and fix a bug that made window titles to be incorrectly aligned.
They also worked on a patch for udisks to be able to hide Snaps from applications that display loop devices, such as GNOME Disks, and updated the LibreOffice Snap to version 5.4.4 of the office suite. While not mentioned in this new Ubuntu Desktop newsletter, Canonical decided to stick with the older Nautilus (Files) 3.26 file manager to ensure out-of-the-box support for desktop icons.