Weekly newsletter 7th July 2017

[Will Cooke]

Hi all,

Here's this week's update:

= GNOME =

We’ve been working on the migration and transition processes for users
going from Unity 7 to GNOME Shell.  We’ve worked on migrating favourites,
the Amazon launcher, resetting scaling factors and migrating
unity-control-center shortcuts to gnome-control-center.  You can read more
about the changes to the GNOME session here:

https://code.launchpad.net/~ubuntu-desktop/gnome-session/ubuntu

This has now been released into Artful, and we’d be very interested in
getting bug reports for things which are not migrating correctly.  Please
log bugs here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-session


= LivePatch =

We’ve updated the software properties window which displays the current
state of Live Patches installed or available following work with the design
team, another design iteration is in progress and we’ll refresh the design
once that’s completed.  The LivePatch team are working on an authentication
API to allow us to register and obtain a key within a Live Patch setup tool.

= Snaps =

A new version of the LibreOffice Snap is available for testing.  We’d
appreciate your feedback:
https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/call-for-testing-libreoffice-5-3-4-snap/1205


= Video & Audio =

We’re making progress on accelerated video playback on Intel, but we’re
uncovering a lot of bugs along the way.  Bugs in the Intel VA driver, bugs
in Totem and bugs in GStreamer - but we’re chipping away at them.  As
always, this wiki page has more details:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/IntelQuickSyncVideo
While we’re focusing on Intel at the moment, Nvidia and AMD will be worked
on it time.

At the Snappy sprint last week we were talking to the Elementary developers
about Pulse Audio and the Cork plugin which should mute/pause audio when a
call comes in.
They logged a bug and we now have a PPA up for testing.  If you’re
interested in testing this out, please read this post:
https://plus.google.com/+WillCooke/posts/2mnKPykFpM3


= Updates =

Chromium 59.0.3071.109 was published to all supported releases
Updated Chromium beta to 60.0.3112.50
Pulse Audio 1:8.0-0ubuntu3.3 now released into Xenial.


= Unity 7 =

Unity 7 is supported in the current releases, and we’re working on landing
some further improvements and bug fixes to the low graphics mode in
Xenial.  This will be of most use to people running Unity 7 over a remote
desktop protocol or on computers without advanced graphics cards.
Specifically the improvements are with the fade-out animation which was
still happening despite having a duration of zero, optimising the damage
events when resizing windows to only redraw the border when necessary and
some improvements in the colour averaging routines used in opaque regions
of the shell.
We also expect the Unity 7 session to still work in 17.10, but there will
be some issues along the way.  We’ve started to list the known and expected
issues here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Unity/NotDefaultIssues
As always, testing and bug reports are welcome.


= In The News =

Robert shares his update from the Snappy sprint:
http://bobthegnome.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/snappy-sprint-london-june-2017.html

Iain shares some insights into the move from Unity to GNOME:
https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/07/03/switching-from-unity-to-gnome-shell-first-challenges/

Ubuntu Testing Days for GNOME:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMOwozLBdXI

Cheers, Will
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