From everyone at Ubuntu, our hearty congratulations and thanks for the 3.26 release.

As you’re no doubt aware by now the next release of Ubuntu, the Artful Aardvark, is only a few short weeks away and will bring the latest GNOME desktop environment with it. We’d planned to ship 3.26 from the beginning of this cycle and so the release of the latest stable version of GNOME cements that plan and will provide users of Ubuntu with lots of new features. The GNOME project, which recently celebrated it’s 20th birthday, has over 6000 contributors, and we’re proud to count ourselves in that number.

Here’s a very quick run down on some of the new features Ubuntu users will see in 17.10 courtesy of the 3.26 release, codenamed “Manchester”:

System Settings

Users of the Artful daily images will have noticed the new layout for Settings land recently. The new layout replaces the grid-of-icons with a quicker to navigate list down the left side and options on the right:

This made it easier for us to add our extra settings for the dock, for example.

All the latest GNOME apps

The new release brings new versions of all your favourite core apps, including gedit, Simple Scan, Calendar, Terminal, etc.

Improved Display Settings

The Display Settings have been redesigned for the new release to make it easier to see an overview of how your displays are configured. There have also been improvements especially relevant to HiDPI users and this lays a good foundation for more improvements in subsequent releases.

Connectivity Checking Privacy Controls

We’ve enabled the connectivity checker in 17.10 to automatically detect captive portals, and to accompany this, we’ve added a new setting in Privacy to turn this feature off.

Ubuntu and GNOME

While Ubuntu is not shipping a pure-upstream version of the GNOME desktop (see Didier’s blog series for the full story), it’s important to stress how accommodating and welcoming the GNOME project has been to our ideas. When we met at GUADEC back in July we spoke about our desire to ship a customised desktop and received advice and the blessing from the project. This made it possible for us to map out what we wanted to deliver in a few hours and leave GUADEC with a good clear plan. A plan that will shortly be realised.

Ubuntu GNOME

You can, of course, still get that pure upstream experience in Ubuntu. Simply install the gnome-session package and select GNOME from the greeter. Hey presto! Upstream GNOME.

You can read the full GNOME announcement here.

Raise a glass to GNOME 3.26 and forwards to the next release!