Ubuntu 17.10 Still Working Towards Video Acceleration, Unity 7 Woes

Will Cooke of Canonical has shared another weekly status update for the work going into the GNOME desktop for Ubuntu 17.10 and their other efforts this cycle.

Ubuntu developers this week have made progress on transitioning more of their Ubuntu desktop changes to the GNOME Shell, GUI-based LivePatch support is advancing, there's a new Snap of LibreOffice, and they remain at work on out-of-the-box video acceleration.

For video acceleration, Ubuntu developers continue to focus on Intel VA-API support via Quick Sync Video. They have reportedly hit "a lot of bugs along the way" from the VA-API driver to issues in media players and GStreamer. They also say in this post they will be working on NVIDIA and AMD video acceleration in time, but without revealing any details. Presumably that will come down to enabling the VDPAU state tracker by default for Gallium3D drivers.

Cooke has also warned that while Unity 7 will remain in the archive for installation on Ubuntu 17.10, the experience will be degraded. Among the expected issues at this time are input problems with GNOME using libinput but Unity 7 not dealing well with it, default GNOME applications may look less integrated, no online accounts support, settings problems, and less Unity launcher integration.

More details on the Ubuntu desktop progress over the past week via this Ubuntu Insights blog post.