• Ubuntu 18.10's New Community Theme Is Named Yaru, Here's What It Looks Like

  Ubuntu contributor Didier Roche announced today the name and plans of the community theme that's being prepared for the upcoming Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) release.

  As you're probably aware the Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) operating system will feature brand-new system theme and icons by default for new installations, and the theme has been developed by various members of the Ubuntu community instead of Canonical's employees. Until today, the theme was known as Communitheme, but from now on it's called Yaru.

• Didier Roche: Open The Cosmic Gate: A beautiful theme gets a beautiful name

  Communitheme has been a community effort from the start with an overwhelming amount of feedback from an even larger community. Surprisingly, the still ongoing discussion thread of more than 1500 messages hasn’t (yet?) broken discourse!

  However, the effort to refresh the look and feel of Ubuntu has gone way beyond just a theme. From the start, Sam Hewitt’s beautiful Suru icons were included and over time, the effort brought new system sounds and new cursors under its wing. Some of the design discussions have gone even further than this, but the desire to stay as close to upstream GNOME as possible has put most of those in the freezer for now. So, in order to reflect the broad scope and in light of its upcoming inclusion in Ubuntu, a new name is in order.

  [...]

  Note that screenshots are still Work In Progress, there is still some discussions about keeping the Ubuntu logo by default on the launcher or not and other fundamentals changes that the community can decide until the Cosmic Cuttlefish release.

• A hash table re-hash

  Hash tables! They’re everywhere. They’re also pretty boring, but I’ve had GLib issue #1198 sitting around for a while, and the GNOME move to GitLab resulted in a helpful reminder (or two) being sent out that convinced me to look into it again with an eye towards improving GHashTable and maybe answering some domain-typical questions, like “You’re using approach X, but I’ve heard approach Y is better. Why don’t you use that instead?” and “This other hash table is 10% faster in my extremely specific test. Why is your hash table so bad?”.

  And unfairly paraphrased as those questions may be, I have to admit I’m curious too. Which means benchmarks. But first, what exactly makes a hash table good? Well, it depends on what you’re looking for. I made a list.

Linux Mint plans to make more performance improvements to the Cinnamon desktop ahead of its next release.

Similar work featured as part of Cinnamon 3.8, released as part of Linux Mint 19, and improved the responsiveness of launching apps on the desktop.

For the next major release of the Cinnamon desktop environment, the team want to tackle another performance-related bugbear: screen tearing.

“On modern NVIDIA GPUs we’re able to get rid of screen tearing by using “Force Composition Pipeline” in NVIDIA-Settings. With Vsync disabled in Cinnamon we then enjoy a faster desktop environments with no screen tearing,“, writes Cinnamon’s lead developer Clement Lefebvre in a recent blog post.

• KDE Team Announces Major Improvements in Upcoming KDE 18.08 Release

  The developers of Linux’s KDE suite have announced a major slew of updates set to be included in the upcoming KDE 18.08, set for an August 2018 release. Details for these updates revolve around a range of new features and overall polish for the core KDE apps including Gwenview, Spectacle, Konsole, and Dolphin, as well as focusing on the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.14 update due in October.

  Due to KDE’s open-source nature, the devs also have a site up for people interested in getting involved, whether its simple bug reporting or actually being hands-on with the development using C++, Qt, and CMake. You can read more about their community program at KDE – Get Involved.

• This week in Usability & Productivity, part 28

  Here’s another big week for KDE’s Usability and Productivity initiative. We’re getting ready for the release of KDE Applications 18.08–the second of our three yearly Applications releases. As the numbers in the version suggest, it will be released in August of 2018, about a month from now. As such, there’s been a lot of focus on new features and polish for core KDE apps such as Dolphin, Gwenview, Konsole, and Spectacle. We’re also ramping up our work for KDE Plasma 5.14, which is scheduled for release in October.

• I’ve built a box

  This is not the typical post I use to write (which is usually about what I do at work, often related to GNOME, so if you’re not interested, just skip it…). But a couple of months ago I did something different that I still want to write about. That thing was a wooden box (sorry if you were expecting a Gavin Box) that I was asked to carve by my brother for his wedding, to be used for carrying the wedding rings.

  The wedding had a Game of Thrones’s theme (there was not blood in it though, if you’re wondering), so naturally my brother wanted some of that in the box. Thus, my initial idea was to just buy a box and carve something to do with GoT and include their names. Something like this, as my brother sent me for inspiration.

• Bastian Ilsø Hougaard: GUADEC18 Developer Center BoF Part 3: Challenges

  Currently, the Developer Center infrastructure and documentation suffers from low to non-existing maintenance. It’s a sign we need to take serious. Do we need lower the barrier to contributing to the developer documentation? What can we do to make the infrastructure easier to maintain? The underlying issue here likely also ties into why we now see new GNOME documentation hosted on other websites by different maintainers powered by different underlying technologies. I think this challenge needs both thinking from a technical point of view (how we might support editing multi-language documentation and auto-generated documentation) and an organizational point of view (assigning maintainership, reviewing our docs, aligning visions).

• Kubuntu 18.04 Reviewed in Linux ( Pro ) Magazine

  Kubuntu Linux has been my preferred Linux distribution for more than 10 years. My attraction to the KDE desktop and associated application set, has drawn from Kubuntu user, to a tester, teacher, developer, community manager and councilor. I feel really privileged to be part of, what can only be described as, a remarkable example of the free software, and community development of an exceptional product.

  This latest release 18.04, effectively the April 2018 release, is a major milestone. It is the first LTS Long Term Support release of Kubuntu running the “Plasma 5” desktop.
  The improvements are so considerable, in both performance and modern user interface ( UI ) design, that I was really excited about wanting to tell the world about it.

• Going to Akademy

  Happy to participate in a tradition I’ve admired from afar but never been able to do myself… until this year. My tickets are bought, my passport is issued, and I’m going to Akademy! Hope to see you all there!

• System76's New Manufacturing Facility, Ubuntu 17.10 Reaches End of Life, Google Cloud Platform Marketplace, Stranded Deep Now Available for Linux and Cutelyst New Release

  Cutelyst, a C++ web framework based on Qt, has a new release. The update includes several bug fixes and some build issues with buildroot. See Dantti's Blog for all the details. Cutelyst is available on GitHub.

• GUADEC 2018 Videos: Help Wanted

  At this year’s GUADEC in Almería we had a team of volunteers recording the talks in the second room. This was organized very last minute as initially the University were going to do this, but thanks to various efforts (thanks in particular to Adrien Plazas and Bin Li) we managed to record nearly all the talks. There were some issues with sound on both the Friday and Saturday, which Britt Yazel has done his best to overcome using science, and we are now ready to edit and upload the 19 talks that took place in the 2nd room.

  To bring you the videos from last year we had a team of 5 volunteers from the local team who spent our whole weekend in the Codethink offices. (Although none of us had much prior video editing experience so the morning of the first day was largely spent trying out different video editors to see which had the features we needed and could run without crashing too often… and the afternoon was mostly figuring out how transitions worked in Kdenlive).

• GUADEC 2018

  This year I attended my second GUADEC in beautiful Almería, Spain. As with the last one I had the opportunity to meet many new people from the extended GNOME community which is always great and I can’t recommend it enough for anybody involved in the project.

  [...]

  Flatpak continues to have a lot of healthy discussions at these events. @matthiasclasen made a post summarizing the BoF so check that out for the discussions of the soon landing 1.0 release.

  So lets start with the Freedesktop 18.07 (date based versioning now!) runtime which is in a much better place than 1.6 and will be solving lots of problems such as multi-arch support and just long term maintainability. I was really pleased to see all of the investment in BuildStream and the runtime from CodeThink which is really needed in the long term.