Xubuntu Development Update July 2021

Table of Contents

I’m finally returning to regular FOSS development time, focusing again on Xubuntu. Resuming team votes and getting community feedback has kicked off development on Xubuntu 21.10 “Impish Indri.” Recent team votes have expanded Xubuntu’s collection of apps. It’s my Xubuntu development update for July 2021!

Update 7/31: Added Hexchat as another GTK 2 application. Thanks Yousuf!

New Additions

Disk Usage Analyzer (baobab)

Baobab is a utility that scans your storage devices and remote locations and reports on the disk space used by each file or directory. It’s useful for tracking down what’s eating your disk space so you can keep your storage from filling up.

Baobab makes it easy to visualize your disk usage and drill down to find large files.

Disks (gnome-disk-utility)

Disks is an all-in-one utility for managing storage devices. Its feature list is expansive, but some key features include:

Create and restore disk images (including flashing ISOs to thumb drives)
Partition and format disks, with encryption support
Inspect drive speed and health
Edit mounting rules (basically a user-friendly fstab editor)

GNOME Disks makes managing your storage a lot easier. Never manually edit fstab again.

Rhythmbox

Rhythmbox is a music-playing and library application. It supports local files and audio streams and includes a radio browser to find online radio stations. In Xubuntu, we currently use the default layout (see left screenshot), but community members have proposed using the Alternative Toolbar plugin. Which do you prefer? Vote in the Twitter poll!

Left: default layout; Right: Alternative Toolbar layout.

Clipman (xfce4-clipman-plugin)

Clipman is a clipboard management application and plugin. It keeps a history of text and images copied to the clipboard and allows you to paste it later. Clipboard history can also be searched with the included xfce4-clipman-history command.

Clipman remembers your clipboard history and makes it easy to paste later.

Removals

Pidgin

Pidgin is a multi-client chat program that has been included in Xubuntu since the beginning when it was known as Gaim. In recent years, as chat services have moved to proprietary and locked-down protocols, Pidgin has become less and less useful, leading to its removal from Xubuntu. If you want to install Pidgin on your system, you can find it on GNOME Software.

Active Team Votes

Themes

We’ve got an active team vote to add two new themes to our seed: Arc and Numix Blue.

The Arc theme is a series of flat themes with transparent elements. It includes light and dark themes supporting numerous desktop environments and applications.

Arc comes in four variants: Arc, Dark, Darker, and Lighter (not pictured).

Numix Blue is a blue variation of the Numix theme already included in Xubuntu. It’s an unofficial fork that has some graphical differences, aside from the switch to a blue accent color.

Numix (left) has been a part of Xubuntu for years. Numix Blue offers a “cooler” version for your desktop.

Clipman by Default

Since we added Clipman to Xubuntu, we now have a second vote to include it in the panel by default. This would automatically enable Clipman’s clipboard management, which I’m personally opposed to. I frequently copy sensitive strings to the clipboard for my use case, and I don’t want them to be saved or displayed anywhere. New users would have no idea the clipboard monitor is even running.

Process Updates

Xubuntu Seed

Because our seed is also updated by Ubuntu maintainers, it is important that the code continues to be hosted on Launchpad. The @Xubuntu/xubuntu-seed code is mirrored from Launchpad every few hours. I made some small improvements to help reduce the friction between the two systems.

Issues are now synced from Launchpad for the xubuntu-meta source package. I found a solution by the Yaru team for syncing the issues using GitHub actions. Our syncing scripts run daily, syncing both newly created issues and issues that have been closed out.

Syncing issues from Launchpad makes it easier to browse issues from a single location on GitHub.

I’ve also added a GitHub action to prevent pull requests on our mirror repository. Since the repository is a mirror repository, pull requests are not actionable on GitHub. This action automatically closes those pull requests with a comment pointing the contributor in the right direction.

What’s Next?

Votes are ongoing, and there’s a lot of activity in the Ubuntu space. GNOME 40 and GTK 4 are starting to land, so there’s a strong likelihood that GTK 4 components will make their way into Xubuntu. This means we’ll now have 3 versions of the toolkit thanks to GIMP and Hexchat (GTK 2), Xfce (GTK 3), and GNOME 40 (GTK 4). Hopefully, we’ll see a stable GIMP 3.0 release soon so we can free up some space.

The Impish Indri Release Schedule has some important dates coming soon. August 19 marks Feature Freeze, so the outstanding team votes and new feature requests should be settled soon. We have the User Interface Freeze a few weeks later, on September 9. Let’s keep Xubuntu development rolling forward!

Post photo by Adriel Kloppenburg on Unsplash