Skip to main content
  1. Blog
  2. Article

Will Cooke
on 9 February 2018

Ubuntu Desktop weekly update – February 9, 2018

Here’s the round up from this week:

GNOME

  • The default session has now been switched back to use Xorg by default.  Wayland is still installed and can be selected from the login screen.
  • GNOME 3.27 has entered Freeze in preparation for the 3.28 release scheduled for March.
  • We’ve landed some changes to udisks2 and GNOME Disk Utility which will hide snaps from the list of mounted disks.  This makes the Disks utility easier to work with. These changes have been accepted upstream.
  • We’re working on a fix which will help improve performance when more than one monitor is connected and branches should be proposed upstream in the next week.
  • GNOME Tweaks 3.27.90 has been released
  • Gtk4 has landed in Debian experimental.  We will be following this closely and will report here as soon as we have any definitive plans for Gtk4.

Snaps

  • LibreOffice 6 is now available for testing in the candidate channel.
  • The desktop helpers scripts now have a stable branch and include fixes for using locales from the platform.
  • Fixes have landed in Xenial to improve matching of launcher icons to running snaps and to allow snaps to better integrate with the Unity 7 launcher & GNOME Shell dock badges.
  • Chromium
    • Update dev to 65.0.3325.31 and snap in edge channel
    • Uploaded 64.0.3282.140 to bionic, updates for {artful,xenial,trusty} ready in staging PPA, and pushed snap to the candidate channel

General

  • PulseAudio 1.11 is available in Bionic and includes a couple of fixes for Bluetooth and USB audio devices.
  • BlueZ 5.48 is also ready for testing in Bionic.
  • A long standing bug in the installer where the disk encryption password was asked for before the keyboard locale was set (meaning that the password you entered could well be different next time you enter it, depending on your keyboard layout) has been fixed.

Pro Tip

  • If you use the feature of holding down alt while clicking and dragging inside a window to move it around, under GNOME Shell that key mapping is the super key.  So hold down super (aka The Windows Key), click and hold inside a window and drag it around.

If you’d like to discuss anything in this post you can comment on corresponding post on community.ubuntu.com.

Related posts

Ishani Ghoshal
17 June 2026

Validating real-world skills through Canonical Academy

Ubuntu Community

In an increasingly volatile job market, standing out from the competition is vital. For many in the open source community, formal recognition for self-taught skills is a significant challenge. These skills are often built through hands-on hobbies, side projects, and deep community contributions. While the market is flooded with certificat ...

Bertrand Boisseau
17 June 2026

Virtualized Android comes to Anbox Cloud

Ubuntu Ubuntu tech blog

With our latest 1.30.0 Anbox Cloud release, available today, we are introducing one of the most significant evolutions of the platform to date: support for virtualized Android.  For the first time, Anbox Cloud can launch complete Android system images inside lightweight virtual machines, managed and orchestrated through the same Anbox API ...

Nina Rojc
16 June 2026

Template: Streamlining open source design contributions

Design Ubuntu tech blog

As designers working at Canonical, we’re always thinking about open source. We believe that encouraging more designers to contribute to open source  benefits everyone, from the project maintainers to the end users themselves.   In the 2025 edition of FOSSBackstage conference, we presented our research findings on  why designers don’t get ...