Bid “bonjour” to our Bionic Beaver!

Along with a sneak preview of our official Bionic mascot, it’s a short update this week as we’re all heads-down in bug fixing mode. There are a couple of links to check out if you’re interested in what sort of data we want to collect about hardware and setup, with links to the source.

GNOME

The Community Theme has been rebased on GNOME Shell 3.27.93 and switched to Bionic.

A graphics corruption issues has been bisected and fixed in Ubuntu. Upstream are working on getting a new ioctl in to the kernel and work is being tracked here.

We’ve fixed a bug with Synaptics touchpad drivers and Mouse & Touchpad settings in GNOME Control Center. The fix is also upstream.

General

We’ve landed the first changes to the installer to gather some information about how the install has been configured. This data will be written to a file and will be viewable before being sent via a “first run wizard” which is under development.

The tool which gathers hardware information is being developed here. On that page you can see an example of the sort of data that will be reported.

Updates

Libreoffice 6.0.2 has been promoted to the stable channel.

Snaps

The big news of the last few weeks is that Firefox is now available as a snap direct from Mozilla. If you like living life on the edge, then check out version 60 (also the next ESR release) which is available in the edge channel for testing.

To install it simply type:

sudo snap install --edge firefox

If you’d like to discuss any of the topics in this update, you can do so via the Community Hub: https://community.ubuntu.com/t/desktop-weekly-update-23-march-2018/4794