Productivity is on the minds of the Ubuntu’s desktop developers as they plan what features to ship in the upcoming Ubuntu 24.04 LTS release.
Given that many folks now use of web-based office tools like Microsoft 365 Online and Google Workspace (which is sometimes referred to as ‘gsuite’ by its fans), some time-saving convenience is on the cards.
Though sadly we’re not talking web integration that’s as swish as Unity’s web apps of old, sob!
“We’re creating a series of productivity snaps targeting gsuite and Office 365. When this is done it will be as simple as running sudo snap install gsuite and bam! electron wrapped versions of your productivity must haves will be at your fingertips,” reveals Canonical’s Tim Holmes-Mitra.
Handy!
You can create your own web-wrappers for these services using Google Chrome/Chromium (and presumably a few other browsers, but not with Mozilla Firefox without modifications) right now.
However, you might want to keep your work life strictly separate from your regular web browsing, something these standalone Electron wrappers will do.
Note, this “work” isn’t finished yet; if you execute the command Tim mentions above, it won’t actually install anything — so please don’t go reporting bugs, okay? 😉
But this gift-wrapped wrapper work is on the ‘Noble Numbat’ roadmap (though as these I’d imagine they’d install and work in older versions of the distro too, but I guess we’ll find out in time).
So yeah: something to look out for if you’re an avid user of either service. The first version will be simple, but Tim says the plan is to add deeper integration into the desktop with later releases (being able to open documents from Nautilus in these apps would be ace).
And since these are Snaps, you’ll get those improvements automatically.