14 DAY TRIAL // In the same report published by Canonical's Will Cooke about the company's decision to switch to GNOME's display manager (GDM) as default login manager for the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 operating system, it was revealed that Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) users would soon be able to run the latest GNOME apps as Snaps.
In their attempt to debug various issues with system themes for desktop Snaps, the Ubuntu Desktop team discovered a bug related to desktop launchers, which is currently being fixed as we speak. With this in mind, they also managed to publish the latest GNOME 3.24 platform Snap to the Edge channel of the Snappy Store for developers to be able to build GNOME apps as Snaps for Ubuntu Linux.
"We’ve been debugging issues with themes in desktop Snaps and found a bug. This is being fixed and we will be publishing new documentation about how to use the desktop launchers," says Will Cooke in the report. "The GNOME 3.24 platform Snap is now published in the store edge channel. This allows the developers to build smaller GNOME Snaps. This will allow people to run the latest GNOME apps on Xenial."
As Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) is a short-lived branch of the operating system, supported until January 2018, and because of the fact that Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) is switching to GNOME as default desktop environment, support for running the latest GNOME apps as Snaps will be available only for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) users. Still, this comes as a big, big surprise to all Ubuntu users.