GNOME Shell In Ubuntu 19.04 Should Be Faster, Ubuntu Devs Still Working On New Installer

Being more than a month past the Ubuntu 18.10 release, development on Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" is progressing at full-speed.

Ubuntu 19.04 is starting to take shape with more changes queuing for this next six-month installment to Ubuntu Linux. Over the past week in particular have been several development changes/additions worth pointing out from their development summary.

- Work on showing pending kernel live patches via the Update Manager user interface.

- Various GNOME package updates are now available in the Disco archive.

- Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt continues doing a lot to achieve better performance for the GNOME Shell, including upstream work. Recent performance accomplishments include an icon grid optimization that has been upstreamed, a high CPU usage regression since Ubuntu 18.04 is fixed in Ubuntu 19.04 and being back-ported to Ubuntu 18.10. There is also an X.Org latency fix, nearing the end for improved for multi-monitor performance with GNOME Shell, presentation timing work, and also exploring a Clutter timing issue. Lots of stuff going on for bettering GNOME's performance! The better GNOME multi-monitor performance is an issue in particular I am quite looking forward to being resolved.

- After the Ubuntu 18.04 release earlier this year, Mark Shuttleworth talked of doing a new Ubuntu desktop installer and the possibility of using HTML5 and Electron for it while also underneath leveraging Snaps and the installer work they've been doing on the server side with Curtin. There hasn't been much to report on for that during the 18.10 cycle, but it looks like it's still moving forward and perhaps we'll see an early incarnation of it working for Ubuntu 19.04. Ubuntu developers have been working on some changes to Curtin to suit this new use-case. fixing some bugs in the livecd-rootfs, testing a minimal Ubuntu desktop with Curtin, and figuring out other items that need to be addressed.