Canonical Has Given Launchpad’s Homepage a Facelift
Launched in 2004, Launchpad serves as the linchpin in Ubuntu development. It’s the hub through which developers collaborate, commit code, plan releases, file bugs, add translations, and tackle other tasks related to thrashing out a new release.
But Launchpad’s popularity extends well beyond Canonical’s immediate orbit.
The service is also used by tens of thousands of other free, open-source projects to handle all or some of their own development and/or distribution, and is come-upon by scores of end-user looking to make use of personal package archives (PPAs).
Open-source development skews more towards Git-based services, with Gitlab and Github offering similar issue tracking and planning features, while software distribution has shifted from PPAs to distro-agnostic formats like snap and Flatpak.
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Launchpad News: Launchpad’s new homepage
Launchpad has been around for a while, and its frontpage has remained untouched for a few years now.
If you go into launchpad.net, you’ll notice it looks quite different from what it has looked like for the past 10 years – it has been updated! The goal was to modernize it while trying to keep it looking like Launchpad. The contents have remained the same with only a few text additions, but there were a lot of styling changes.
The most relevant change is that the frontpage now uses Vanilla components (https://vanillaframework.io/docs). This alone, not only made the layout look more modern, but also made it better for a new curious user reaching the page from a mobile device. The accessibility score of the page – calculated with Google’s Lighthouse extension – increased from a 75 to an almost perfect 98!