There has been a widely reported memory leak in the latest version of GNOME Shell which upstream GNOME have been working on fixing. While they finalise their plans and merge patches we have decided to press on with including one of the patches which should fix the biggest issues. In our testing it has proven to work well, but we’d like to get wider testing and feedback as soon as possible so we can spot any regressions before release.

It’s worth pointing out that once the patches are merged upstream, we will be issuing another update bringing us back in line with the upstream version.

You can see some of the history of this bug here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/gnome-shell/+bug/1672297

If you’d like to help test, here’s what to do. These instructions are for amd64 based hardware, so you might need to tweak them slightly if you are using, for example, 32bit.

Download the current daily ISO for your hardware from here:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/bionic-desktop-amd64.iso

Install it

Download the patched version of gjs:

wget https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gjs/1.52.1-1ubuntu1/+build/14773965/+files/gjs_1.52.1-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gjs/1.52.1-1ubuntu1/+build/14773965/+files/libgjs-dev_1.52.1-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gjs/1.52.1-1ubuntu1/+build/14773965/+files/libgjs0g_1.52.1-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb

Install them:

sudo dpkg -iO gjs_1.52.1-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb libgjs-dev_1.52.1-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb libgjs0g_1.52.1-1ubuntu1_amd64.deb

Reboot

Just use the desktop, go about your normal business. If you feel that stability and performance are impacted by the new packages, reinstall from the ISO again and don’t install the new packages. See if it’s better on an “out of the box” install.

We’d really love to hear about any stability problems you’re having, so please contribute to the conversation on this hub post and we will closely monitor it and ask for more debugging info if we need it.

Cheers, Will