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
9 February 2018

Ubuntu Desktop weekly update – February 9, 2018

News Desktop

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
9 February 2018

Will Cooke
2 February 2018

Ubuntu Desktop weekly update – February 2, 2018

News Desktop

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
2 February 2018

Will Cooke
26 January 2018

Bionic Beaver 18.04 LTS to use Xorg by default

News Desktop

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
26 January 2018

Will Cooke
22 January 2018

Ubuntu Desktop weekly update – 22 January 2018

News Desktop

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....

Will Cooke
22 January 2018

Will Cooke
15 December 2017

Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update – December 15th 2017

News Desktop

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
15 December 2017

Will Cooke
1 December 2017

Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: December 1, 2017

Article Desktop

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
1 December 2017

Will Cooke
10 November 2017

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

Article Desktop

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
10 November 2017

Will Cooke
1 November 2017

Canonical joins GNOME Foundation Advisory Board

Article Desktop

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
1 November 2017

Will Cooke
27 October 2017

Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: GNOME Fixes & New Snaps

Article Desktop

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
27 October 2017

Will Cooke
22 September 2017

Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: September 22, 2017

Article Desktop

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

Will Cooke
22 September 2017

Will Cooke
15 September 2017

Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: September 15, 2017

News Desktop

A fairly short update this week as we’re in bug fixing mode ahead of final beta in a couple of weeks. GNOME This week saw the release of GNOME 3.26, and we’re ready to ship it in 17.10. This will bring new versions of the core applications and new features as described in the GNOME

Will Cooke
15 September 2017

Will Cooke
13 September 2017

Congratulations to GNOME on the release of 3.26

Article Desktop

From everyone at Ubuntu, our hearty congratulations and thanks for the 3.26 release. As you’re no doubt aware by now the next release of Ubuntu, the Artful Aardvark, is only a few short weeks away and will bring the latest GNOME desktop environment with it. We’d planned to ship 3.26 from the beginning of

Will Cooke
13 September 2017

Will Cooke
8 September 2017

Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: September 8, 2017

Article Desktop

GNOME GNOME Shell 3.25.91 is now in Artful in preparation for the move to 3.26 before release. We’re adding notification badge support to the Dock extension. This branch has been proposed to the upstream project and is awaiting review. We’ve packaged the KStatusNotifier extension to provide support for indicators. This...

Will Cooke
8 September 2017

Will Cooke
25 August 2017

Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: August 25, 2017

Article Desktop

GNOME Shell Didier has written a series of blog posts detailing how we’ve set up the Ubuntu GNOME Shell session in Artful to co-exist with the default GNOME Shell experience and still give us the flexibility we need to shape the experience as we would like. You can start at day one here. We worked

Will Cooke
25 August 2017