Canonical Makes It Easy to Install Unity7 on Ubuntu 17.10, GNOME Remains Default

The plan for shipping a GNOME-based Ubuntu 17.10 release did not change. Canonical said that they wouldn’t abandon Unity 7 so fast, and that users would still be able to install their beloved desktop environment from the main software repositories of the OS, just that there won’t be any new features added to it. However, they are now preparing to replace the LightDM login manager with GDM by default. On the other hand, work on enabling hardware-accelerated video playback by default in Ubuntu 17.10 continues with a new proof-of-concept that uses the latest GStreamer multimedia framework and a VA-API pipeline, resulting is a 3% CPU usage when playing H.264 4K 60FPS videos on Intel Haswell GPUs. Playing 4K H.265 HEVC videos is also possible on Intel Skylake or later processors.