14: Linux Action News

12 August 2017

Flatpak and Snaps get a boost, changes to the Ubuntu community, and development on Ubuntu 17.10 and taken an interesting turn. Plus good news about Firefox and Android updates.

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  • Snaps in Solus — Occurs to me that I likely have to make some kind of statement or whathaveyou about the whole “Solus adopting snaps” thing.
  • Ubuntu Community Hub Proposal — I propose we replace the Community Portal with a dynamic and collaboratively maintained site. The site would raise the profile of conversations and content, to improve our onboarding and communication issues.
  • Ubuntu Artful Desktop Fit and Finish Sprint — First up is the Desktop Fit & Finish Sprint on August 24th and 25th.
  • 50% CPU savings w/Hardware Accelerated Video Playback — We’re testing some patches to Chromium 60 in Artful to enable video acceleration and we’re seeing roughly a 50% saving in CPU overhead when using VA API.
  • Nextcloud push into education — Today we are very proud to officially announce the Nextcloud Education Edition, developed in collaboration with Moodle, DeiC, regio iT, the TU Berlin and Univention.
  • Firefox 55 — Performance changes include significantly faster startup times when restoring lots of tabs and settings that let users take greater control of our new multi-process architecture. We’ve also upgraded the address bar to make finding what you want easier, with search suggestions and the integration of our one-click search feature, and safer, by prioritizing the secure - https - version of sites when possible.
  • Firefox 55 Advanced Performance Features — Firefox 55 introduces several new low-level capabilities that help improve the performance of demanding web applications
  • Epiphany gets Firefox Sync — You can sync bookmarks, history, passwords, and open tabs with other Epiphany instances and as well as both desktop and mobile Firefox.
  • Photon UI — Version 57 of Firefox is slated to be released sometime in November and the biggest user facing change is its new user interface.
  • Android 8.0’s “streaming OS updates” will work even if your phone is full | Ars Technica — Starting with Android 8.0, the A/B system partition setup is being upgraded with a “streaming updates” feature. Update data will arrive from the Internet directly to the offline system partition, written block by block, in a ready-to-boot state.