Skip to main content
  1. Blog
  2. Article

Will Cooke
on 15 December 2017

Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update – December 15th 2017


Here’s the last newsletter for 2017, we’ll be back in the new year. On behalf of the whole Desktop Team I wish you all a happy holiday and a peaceful 2018.

GNOME

Some important fixes landed in fonts-noto-emoji.  🍔  🍺 🧀

Work continues on removing as much gtk2 as we can. A fresh 18.04 install now only installs three gtk2 rdepends: Firefox, Thunderbird and libgtk2-perl (for debconf). Firefox 58 (in beta) has dropped the gtk2 dependency.

Found and fixed a shadow offset bug in gtk+ related to the fraction scaling work.

General

The MIR for spice-vdagent is progressing. This adds some nice features to guest systems running with GNOME Boxes such as copy-and-paste between host & guest and arbitrary screen resolution support.

We’ve ported our Selenium autopackage tests for Chromium over to Firefox as well. This makes a wider range of automatic integration tests available to Firefox.

Avahi: We received the patch for advertising services on localhost. It is actually a one-liner! Courtesy of Rithvik Patibandla one of the GSoC 2017 Open Printing students. 18.04 will ship the complete driverless printing fun, including USB.

We’re looking for more help to verify the Unity 7 fixes. If you can spare an hour or two please see this thread for more info.

Snaps

A couple more upstream projects have merged our snapcraft.yaml files in to their trees. You can see the current state of the GNOME snaps we are maintaining here.

Updates

  • Chromium
    • Updated chromium beta to 63.0.3239.84 and updated snap in beta channel
    • Updated chromium dev to 64.0.3282.14 and updated snap in edge channel
    • Updated chromium stable to 63.0.3239.84 (all supported series + bionic-proposed), snap in candidate channel
  • Libreoffice
    • Promoted 5.4.3 snap to stable channel

Related posts


Canonical
10 March 2026

Fast-tracking industrial and AI deployment on Renesas RZ platforms 

Canonical announcements Article

Certified Ubuntu 24.04 LTS images now available Canonical is pleased to announce the general availability (GA) of certified Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Ubuntu Core 24 images for the Renesas RZ/G2L and RZ/G2LC 64-bit microprocessors (MPUs) platforms. With a production-ready Ubuntu version, users can benefit from enterprise-grade security, long-te ...


Canonical
9 March 2026

Canonical and Arduino collaborate to enable Ubuntu on the VENTUNO Q, the next generation platform for AI

Ubuntu Article

Through a strategic partnership with Canonical, Arduino’s latest product offers a seamless Linux experience for complex AI workloads in robotics, edge AI vision and more. LONDON, UK – March 9, 2026 – Today, Arduino announced the launch of the Arduino® VENTUNO™ Q, a dual-brain board designed for high-performance computing and physical actu ...


ijlal-loutfi
6 March 2026

Sovereign clouds: enhanced data security with confidential computing 

Confidential computing Article

Increasingly, enterprises are interested in improving their level of control over their data, achieving digital sovereignty, and even building their own sovereign cloud. However, this means moving beyond thinking about just where your data is stored to thinking about the entire data lifecycle.  In this blog, we cover the differences betwe ...