All good things must come to an end, however, in that particular case, it’s rather a beginning! We are indeed almost done in our road to Artful, which means that 17.10 is just around the corner: official Ubuntu 17.10 release is due tomorrow. Of course, it doesn’t mean we stop right away working on it: you will have bug fixes and security updates for 9 months of support! It’s thus time to close this series on Artful, and for this, we are going to tackle one topic we didn’t get to yet, which is quite important approaching the release: upgrading from a previous Ubuntu release!

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Since the Ubuntu Rally in New York, the Ubuntu desktop team is full speed ahead on the latest improvements we can make to our 17.10 Ubuntu release, Artful Aardvark. Last Thursday was our Final Freeze and I think it’s a good time to reflect some of the changes and fixes that happened during the rally and the following weeks. This list isn’t exhaustive at all, of course, and only cover partially changes in our default desktop session, featuring GNOME Shell by default.

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The Ubuntu desktop team and a lot other people from the Ubuntu community are gathering for the week in New York for the Ubuntu Rally. It’s time to get the final touch and bug fixes for Ubuntu artful which is turning itself soon into Ubuntu 17.10. As you probably know if you follow this blog series, it will feature GNOME Shell by default, with slight modifications to ease and adapt to our audience for this new user experience.

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Now that GNOME 3.26 is released, available in Ubuntu artful, and final GNOME Shell UI is confirmed, it’s time to adapt our default user experience to it. Let’s discuss how we worked with dash to dock upstream on the transparency feature. For more background on our current transition to GNOME Shell in artful, you can refer back to our decisions regarding our default session experience as discussed in my blog post.

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We’ll focus today on our advanced user base. We, of course, try to keep our default user experience as comprehensible as possible for the wider public, but we want as well to think about our more technical users by fine tuning the experience… and all of this, obviously, while changing our default session to use GNOME Shell. For more background on our current transition to GNOME Shell in artful, you can refer back to our decisions regarding our default session experience as discussed in my blog post.

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Let’s talk today about collaboration (with System76 in this case) and how we give more benefits to both Ubuntu and the upcoming Pop! OS user base. For more background on our current transition to GNOME Shell in artful, you can refer back to our decisions regarding our default session experience as discussed in my blog post. Day 11: collaboration and GDM theming. As you probably know by know reading this series of blog posts, Ubuntu artful introduces a vanilla GNOME session type in addition to the Ubuntu style and experience default session.

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It’s time for the 10th update iteration on how we are progressing in your new GNOME Shell Ubuntu Artful default session. This one is about Control Center updates to latest GNOME version. For more background on this, you can refer back to our decisions regarding our default session experience as discussed in my blog post. Day 10: Dock settings in its own panel I’ve already blogged about it a few weeks ago when we introduced our Ubuntu Dock: we want to expose few settings of Dash to Dock to our user base for making them able to slightly customize their default experience.

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First, I want to thank Alberto for adding me to planet GNOME, and hi! If we wanted to make a prank for this, we wouldn’t have done better. However, as we didn’t prepare anything, it seems that the planet GNOME importer machinery had other plans for us! :) Indeed, the two previous posts that were imported are respectively from 2011 and 2012 (and their respective publisher date in the RSS ought to match), the first one being an April fool coordinated with part of the GNOME release at the time, and the second one the GNOME Control Center changes done for the unity launcher at the time.

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A very visual update today on our new Artful default session! This one is, as promised about our new GNOME Shell theme and you can see below some examples of those changes. For more background on this, you can refer back to our decisions regarding our default session experience as discussed in my blog post. Day 9: Uploading new theme changes As I reported a little bit more than a week ago, the Fit and Finish Sprint went well and we have tackle some important areas of changes.

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A short blog post today to tease a little bit about our future theme changes that are going to land in Ubuntu Artful as we are transforming our default session. For more background on this, you can refer back to our decisions regarding our default session experience as discussed in my blog post. Day 8: Fit and Finish sprint (early) report As I’m in the Eurostar1 heading back home from the Fit and Finish Sprint, let me quickly write up how excellent this session has been!

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