Linux Action News 14

Flatpak and snap get the Solus boost, Ubuntu's community is getting a remake, and development on Ubuntu 17.10 has taken an interesting turn.

Plus more good news for Firefox users, and why Google's "streaming OS updates" could be great for the Android ROM community.

• Snaps in Solus — Occurs to me that I likely have to make some kind of statement or whathaveyou about the whole "Solus adopting snaps" thing.
• Ubuntu Community Hub Proposal — I propose we replace the Community Portal with a dynamic and collaboratively maintained site. The site would raise the profile of conversations and content, to improve our onboarding and communication issues.
• Ubuntu Artful Desktop Fit and Finish Sprint — First up is the Desktop Fit & Finish Sprint on August 24th and 25th.
• 50% CPU savings w/Hardware Accelerated Video Playback — We’re testing some patches to Chromium 60 in Artful to enable video acceleration and we’re seeing roughly a 50% saving in CPU overhead when using VA API.
• Nextcloud push into education — Today we are very proud to officially announce the Nextcloud Education Edition, developed in collaboration with Moodle, DeiC, regio iT, the TU Berlin and Univention.
• Firefox 55 — Performance changes include significantly faster startup times when restoring lots of tabs and settings that let users take greater control of our new multi-process architecture. We’ve also upgraded the address bar to make finding what you want easier, with search suggestions and the integration of our one-click search feature, and safer, by prioritizing the secure - https - version of sites when possible.
• Firefox 55 Advanced Performance Features — Firefox 55 introduces several new low-level capabilities that help improve the performance of demanding web applications
• Epiphany gets Firefox Sync — You can sync bookmarks, history, passwords, and open tabs with other Epiphany instances and as well as both desktop and mobile Firefox.
• Photon UI — Version 57 of Firefox is slated to be released sometime in November and the biggest user facing change is its new user interface.
• Android 8.0’s “streaming OS updates” will work even if your phone is full | Ars Technica — Starting with Android 8.0, the A/B system partition setup is being upgraded with a "streaming updates" feature. Update data will arrive from the Internet directly to the offline system partition, written block by block, in a ready-to-boot state.