Ubuntu 18.10 Aims To Lower Power Use, Default To New Desktop Theme

Will Cooke, the Director of the Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical, has outlined the major desktop plans for the Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" cycle.

Among the changes expected for Ubuntu 18.10 include:

- Improvements to GNOME Software, more details to come later this summer following their sprint.

- Improving the start-up time for Snap applications.

- Supporting the Chromium web-browser as a Snap at which point they will drop the Chromium Debian package.

- Following the work done by Red Hat on improving power consumption with Fedora 28, Canonical just so happens to now be planning power consumption improvements for Ubuntu 18.10 too. They will try to turn on more power-saving settings without hurting stability.

- Supporting sharing of media content to DLNA clients without needing any extra software. They also want to make the easy creation of Samba SMB shares back on the desktop too.

- The Communitheme desktop theme for the GNOME Shell is planned to be the default for Ubuntu 18.10.

- Better phone integration by shipping GS Connect as part of the desktop, the GNOME port of KDE Connect.

- Starting work on a new installer for the Ubuntu desktop.

- Public reporting of their metrics data being collected since Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

- Pulling in the latest upstream GNOME components.

- On the Ubuntu 18.04.1 front, they hope to have support for unlocking the desktop with your fingerprint, the Thunderbolt settings within GNOME Control Center, and XDG Portals support for Snaps.

More details on the Canonical desktop plans for Ubuntu 18.10 can be found via the Ubuntu blog.