Will Cooke

GNOME GDM has now replaced LightDM. We’re working on the transition between display managers to make sure that users are seamlessly transitioned to the new stack. We’re doing regular automated upgrade tests to make sure everything keeps working, but we’re keen to get your bug reports. We’ve spent time cleaning up the desktop seeds and

  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. This has

GNOME We’ve migrated ubuntu-session to a new unity-session package. This means that the default session is GNOME Shell and people can install Unity 7 and its related packages via unity-session. The migration is working well so far, but we still have some more work to do in order to make sure everything “just works”. LivePatch

GNOME Further theme fixes have been made in Artful to get GNOME Shell and Ambiance looking just right. Network Manager is updated to 1.8. It is currently awaiting the resolution of some test issues before it migrates to the release, but that should take place in the coming days. GNOME Terminal received a small fix

GNOME We’ve made the decision to switch to using GNOME Display Manager (GDM) instead of LightDM. We had planned to try LightDM, and based on our investigations it became apparent that we would need to invest a considerable amount of time making changes to get everything to work correctly, more time than we have. We

Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak has landed and brings with it the Unity 8 technical preview desktop session. Unity 8 has been the face of the Ubuntu phone and tablet for a few years and has quickly evolved its convergence feature set to allow it to work seamlessly between form factors such as phones, tablets and

Unity 7 has had a low graphics mode for a long time but recently we’ve been making it better. Improvements have been made to reduce the amount of visual effects that are seen while running in low graphics mode.  At a high level this includes things like: Reducing the amount of animation in elements such as the window switcher, launcher an

Today we have enabled upgrade notifications from 14.04 LTS to the first point-release for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, versioned 16.04.1. The first point release for an LTS comes out 3 months after the initial release and then every 6 months until the next LTS is released.  Upgrade notifications happen a short while later after some more QA testing.