Oliver Smith as the Interim Engineering Director for the Ubuntu desktop provided an update around recent efforts on Ubuntu 24.10.

Prior to the Ubuntu 24.10 feature freeze, the GNOME 47 beta has landed for Ubuntu 24.10 daily builds. The GNOME 47 desktop will be providing the out-of-the-box experience on Ubuntu 24.10. This was expected to happen and great to see it carried out given all the great [1]GNOME 47 changes upstream from Wayland enhancements and more.

Canonical engineers have also continued spending a lot of time on further enhancing the Snap experience on Ubuntu for these sandboxed apps. Ubuntu 24.10 now has progress bars in the dock for Snaps that refresh in the background, improved Snapd handling for the latest NVIDIA graphics driver to behave better with the Steam Snap, seeded Snap tracks for desktop apps, and better Snap track migration handling on Ubuntu upgrades. Ubuntu 24.10's App Center has also seen improvements with its "Manage" page, among other refinements.

Snaps continue to be [2]one of the big focuses for Canonical and better value differentiating Ubuntu from others and being important to their support/monetization strategy with their ecosystem.

More details on these latest improvements for the Ubuntu 24.10 desktop via [3]this Ubuntu Discourse post . The UI freeze for Ubuntu 24.10 is coming up in early September, the kernel freeze in late September, and the final freeze at the start of October. The Ubuntu 24.10 beta is expected out on 19 September and the official Ubuntu 24.10 release on 10 October.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/GNOME+47

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/FOSDEM-2024-Snaps

[3] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-desktop-s-24-10-dev-cycle-part-4-august-update/47217