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Canonical's Director of Ubuntu Desktop Will Cooke announced today that the company wants to implement some data collecting mechanism in future releases of Ubuntu Linux to improve the things that matter most to users.

The information Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop engineers need to improve certain aspects of the Linux-based operating system about includes users' setups, installed software, Ubuntu flavor and version, network connectivity, CPU family, RAM, disk size, screen resolution, GPU vendor and model, as well as OEM manufacturer.

In addition, the company says that it needs to know your location, yet it promises to not store IP addresses of users. Other information that would be collected includes total installation time, automatic login info, selected disk layout, LivePatch enablement, and if you choose to install updates or third-party software during installation.

"We want to be able to focus our engineering efforts on the things that matter most to our users, and in order to do that we need to get some more data about sort of setups our users have and which software they are running on it," says Will Cooke, Director of Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical.
"The data collection option will be implemented in the installer"

Canonical says that it plans to implement the new data collection option in the installer through a checkbox named something like "Send diagnostics information to help improve Ubuntu" and enabled by default. Of course, users will be able to uncheck this box during the installation if they don't want Canonical to collect any data.

However, it's important to know that this would help the Ubuntu Desktop development team to focus their efforts on the things that matter the most to you in future versions of Ubuntu. Also, Canonical said that all the collected data from the installation would be securely sent to a service run by Canonical’s IS team via HTTPS.

The data is saved locally, on your computer, and would be sent to Canonical on first boot if an active network connection is detected. Users will be able to access the respective file that contains the collected data and inspect it thoroughly. Canonical said that the results of this data collection would be made public.

The company will also update its Ubuntu privacy policy to reflect this change starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system that is expected to arrive this spring on April 26, 2018. Feedback and comments on this matter are welcomed and valued by Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop team.

That data would include:
* Ubuntu Flavour
* Ubuntu Version
* Network connectivity or not
* CPU family
* RAM
* Disk(s) size
* Screen(s) resolution
* GPU vendor and model
* OEM Manufacturer
* Location (based on the location selection made by the user at
install). No IP information would be gathered
* Installation duration (time taken)
* Auto login enabled or not
* Disk layout selected
* Third party software selected or not
* Download updates during install or not
* LivePatch enabled or not

* Popcon would be installed. This will allow us to spot trends in package
usage and help us to focus on the packages which are of most value to our
users.

* Apport would be configured to automatically send anonymous crash reports
without user interruption.

The results of this data would be made public. E.g. People would be able
to see that X% of Ubuntu users are based in .de vs Y% in .za. Z% of our
users run Dell hardware, and so on.
The Ubuntu privacy policy would be updated to reflect this change.

Any user can simply opt out by unchecking the box, which triggers one
simple POST stating, “diagnostics=false”. There will be a corresponding
checkbox in the Privacy panel of GNOME Settings to toggle the state of this.

And to reiterate, the service which stores this data would *never* store IP
addresses.

Canonical has announced recently that the popular Chromium and Mozilla Firefox open-source web browsers are now installable as Snaps on Ubuntu and other Snap-powered operating systems.

Canonical's Snappy technologies are becoming more and more popular these days as the company behind the widely used Ubuntu plans to enable them by default and even make them a first-class citizen in future releases of its Linux-based operating system.

The great thing about Snap apps is that they are secure by design, utilizing a container-style approach mechanism for deploying software on various GNU/Linux distributions that support Canonical's Snappy universal binary format.

Another thing that makes Snaps great is that you are always getting the latest version of an application as soon as it's released upstream. As such, Canonical tries to convince more and more application developers to port their apps to Snaps for Ubuntu and other distros.

Communitheme, the custom Ubuntu theme created by various members of the Ubuntu Linux community is now available as a Snap package for the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system.

Ubuntu contributor Didier Roche announced today that Ubuntu 18.04 LTS early adopters can now install the Communitheme Ubuntu theme as a Snap package on their computers. You can install it right now by executing the "snap install communitheme" command in the Terminal app.

The theme is available in multiple variants, for the GTK+ 2, GTK+ 3, and Qt frameworks, as well as for the GNOME Shell user interface in both the STABLE and EDGE Snap channels. While most users should install the Communitheme from the stable channel, bleeding-edgers can install it using the "snap install communitheme --edge" command.

"Contrary to a PPA, the snap can be found directly through the Ubuntu Software application, as well as via the snap search command," explained Didier Roche. "Even with this, if something goes terribly bad, snaps allow us to revert to a previous channel."

After installation, to use the Communitheme, you'll have to reboot your Ubuntu PC or log out the current session and choose either the "Ubuntu with Communitheme snap" or "Ubuntu with Communitheme snap on Wayland" sessions from the login screen before logging in.