It’s been over a month since we discussed our GNOME plans and it’s well past time to share our progress. We’re going to do this more regularly moving forward.

Pop Theme

A lot of work is going into making smooth and beautiful boot to login transitions. We have things pretty close on systems with open source graphics drivers (Intel). nvidia’s another story and there’s much to be done there to provide the same experience.

A World Class First Use Desktop

Originally we planned to pull GNOME Initial Setup features into Ubiquity. After digging into GNOME Initial Setup we found that we can provide a better experience going the other way around – making Ubiquity a tiny OS installer and letting GNOME Initial Setup handle all the user details. Work is underway. We added the Encrypted Home Folder feature to GNOME Initial Setup and Users in Settings. This also means that, for the first time, new users created on a computer can have encrypted home folders. We’ve been discussing these changes with Ubuntu along the way and we think they’ll accept our patches.

Along those same lines, we’ve changed GNOME Initial Setup to include all Online Accounts providers. We wanted to provide the ability to setup IMAP, IRC, and other accounts at first boot. We’re working to add CalDav and CardDav provider support now.

Email….. we’ll have to come back to this one. There’s no obvious answer.

GNOME Documents App - this is an interesting app to us. You can modify Google Docs from within the app. We thought we’d try a small project to change its behavior and see what others think. There are three parts: open documents in Edit mode by default (rather than preview), when editing move the View button into the overflow menu and keep the search button, and make the catalog of documents searchable from the shell. I suspect this work will start next week. Searchable from shell might be a challenge but we’ll see where it goes. I’d like to gain some institutional knowledge into shell and its search.



Mobile Integration

We’re targeting this work for 18.04. The project details still need to be fleshed out.

Keeping It All Running with Blessed PPA’s

Turns out this feature was already built into Ubuntu Update Manager but only documented in the code. Here’s how to use it: http://support.system76.com/articles/ppa-third-party/

That’s it for now. More goodness to come soon.