Blog
Will Cooke

Will Cooke

40 posts

Director Of Engineering - Ubuntu Desktop

Will leads the team working on the Ubuntu desktop at Canonical. He has a diverse background originally specialising in data networks and global communications systems and has provided consultancy to clients such as BT, Verizon, Inmarsat and Schlumberger. Will has been using and contributing to Ubuntu since 2005 and in 2015 he was recognised as an Ubuntu Member. He has three kids, plays golf badly and is a member of The Royal Institution of Great Britain.

Will Cooke
16 March 2018

Ubuntu Desktop weekly update – 16th March 2018

Desktop News

We’ve had a busy few weeks, and so this email is a roll up of what’s been going on in Desktopland. Last week we had a team sprint in Budapest where we got to work side by side with our teammates and colleagues across Canonical. Feature Freeze has now passed and we’re working on fixing ...

Will Cooke
23 February 2018

Ubuntu Desktop weekly update – February 23, 2018

Desktop News

GNOME We’ve been working on a GNOME Online Accounts plugin for Ubuntu One. This will allow you to manage your U1 credentials and share them with services which need them, for example Canonical LivePatch. A MR is being proposed upstream. A bug has been fixed which caused some high contrast icons to be missing in ...

Will Cooke
9 February 2018

Ubuntu Desktop weekly update – February 9, 2018

Desktop News

Here’s the round up from this week: GNOME The default session has now been switched back to use Xorg by default. Wayland is still installed and can be selected from the login screen. GNOME 3.27 has entered Freeze in preparation for the 3.28 release scheduled for March. We’ve landed some changes to udisks2 and GNOME ...

Will Cooke
2 February 2018

Ubuntu Desktop weekly update – February 2, 2018

Desktop News

GNOME As you might have already read, we’ve taken the decision to ship Xorg by default in Bionic 18.04 LTS. The Wayland session will still be available as an option at login. You can read more about that here. The Ubuntu Dock extension has been rebased on the latest upstream master and we’ve added some ...

Will Cooke
26 January 2018

Bionic Beaver 18.04 LTS to use Xorg by default

Desktop News

Bionic Beaver, the codename for the next Ubuntu LTS release, is due in April 2018 and will ship with both the traditional Xorg graphics stack as well as the newer Wayland based stack, but Xorg will be the default. 17.10, released in October 2017, ships with the Wayland based graphics server as the default and ...

Will Cooke
22 January 2018

Ubuntu Desktop weekly update – 22 January 2018

Desktop News

Here’s an update on what we’ve been working on over the last couple of weeks: GNOME We’ve been working on a patch for udisks to hide snaps from applications such as GNOME’s Disks. This will hide all loop devices, including installed snaps, from disk management utilities making it less confusing and less cluttered. We’ve reworked ...

Will Cooke
15 December 2017

Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update – December 15th 2017

Desktop News

Here’s the last newsletter for 2017, we’ll be back in the new year. On behalf of the whole Desktop Team I wish you all a happy holiday and a peaceful 2018. GNOME Some important fixes landed in fonts-noto-emoji. 🍔 🍺 🧀 Work continues on removing as much gtk2 as we can. A fresh 18.04 install now only installs ...

Will Cooke
1 December 2017

Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: December 1, 2017

Desktop Article

GNOME GNOME Disk Utility If you have snaps installed and open the Disks utility, your snaps appear as loop devices. We found this to be confusing and a bit messy, so we have proposed a fix upstream and this should be merged soon. Theme The community theme topic has been very busy on the hub. Yesterday we ...

Will Cooke
10 November 2017

Ubuntu Desktop Weekly, Nov 3rd & 10th: Bionic daily images available

Desktop Article

The big news this week is the availability of Bionic daily ISOs. As always, we’re beavering away on the desktop: GNOME We’ve started a conversation on the GNOME mailing list to talk about locking down extensions which are part of a “mode” (a set of compulsory extensions and other settings). Ubuntu ships a mode ...

Will Cooke
1 November 2017

Canonical joins GNOME Foundation Advisory Board

Desktop Article

As you’re no doubt aware, the default Ubuntu desktop is now running GNOME Shell following the 17.10 release and so we naturally have a great deal of interest in the plans and direction of the GNOME project. The best way for us to get more involved in the future of GNOME is to become a ...

Will Cooke
27 October 2017

Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: GNOME Fixes & New Snaps

Desktop Article

I’ll be starting the weekly round-up posts again now that the release is out and 18.04 is getting under way. At this early stage in the development cycle we’re spending a week or so tidying up the loose ends from 17.10, SRUing the important fixes that we’ve found, getting ready to sync new packages from ...

Will Cooke
22 September 2017

Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: September 22, 2017

Desktop Article

We’re less than a week away from Final Beta! It seems to have come round very quickly this cycle. Next week we’re at the Ubuntu Rally in New York City where we will be putting the finishing touches to the beta. In the meantime, here’s a quick rundown on what happened this week: GNOME The ...