Ubuntu 18.04: Up To 10% Faster Installation, Won’t Include New GTK Theme

The development of Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver LTS is going on in full swing. Just recently, we were greeted with the Beta 1 releases for opt-in flavors. We’ve also prepared an always updated article on the Ubuntu 18.04 features to make sure that you stay in the know.

Talking about the changes coming to the upcoming LTS release, a new GTK theme to give Ubuntu a makeover was among the most anticipated ones. However, it looks like the current Ambiance GTK theme will be shipping with 18.04.

As per OMGUbuntu, Bionic Beaver won’t ship the new theme as it has lots of outstanding bugs and “on-going gaps in corner-case usage.” It goes without saying that the theme also lacks real-world testing on a broader scale. It makes sense as the developers would definitely wish to ship a completely stable theme for a release with five years of support.

The theme which is under development by the community is being called CommuniTheme; it’s based on Adwaita, the default upstream GNOME theme.

But don’t worry. Not everything’s lost.

The team has planned to include the theme in Ubuntu 18.10 development cycle to ensure more extensive testing. Moreover, it could also be turned into a Snap app to add a new GNOME session to the login screen. It’ll ensure that users can get the taste of the new theme at the earliest, without any need to install tweaks, etc.

In related news, as per a recent posting on Ubuntu mailing list, the development team is adding support for zstd compression algorithm developed by Facebook.

Zstd offers higher decompression speed as compared to xz and gzip. By running zstd at level 19, the team has been able to achieve a faster installation speed of about 10%.

The devs are also considering to give this implementation a feature freeze exception. By 18.10 release, they also expect to turn it on by default.

Read other upcoming changes coming to Ubuntu 18.04 here in this dedicated article.