Trying something new... For those unaware, all of Pop!_OS software development is on github.com/pop-os and you can track which packages are updated each week by following the pop-os/repo-release repository.
Of course, not everyone has the time to follow these this repository or can easily parse what it all means, so here is my humble initial attempt of summarizing and highlighting the changes for the week (note, I will not list all the changes, just the ones that I think are interesting or noteworthy... I will also be skipping all the COSMIC related packages as most people are not using those yet).
desktop: Remove conflict between pop-de-gnome and sddm
By far the biggest change is the metapackage reorganization and it will be interesting to see where that leads.
Final note, this is only concerning the Pop!_OS specific package updates. You will most likely also receive updates from Ubuntu... which I failed to track this week and so I didn't list here. I may try to do that in the future.
Feel free to let me know what you think of the idea of a weekly package summary or share your experiences with this week's updates!
One thing I would note is that when I received the metapackage update on July 26th, it reinstalled Libreoffice, which I had previously removed. It was no big deal as I was able to uninstall it afterwards.
Yeah, a couple people mentioned that they had apps reinstalled. I had Geary reinstall itself, but no big deal. Just purge it again and put it on sudo apt-mark hold.
one of the bigger changes that prompted it was the Ubuntu Pro ESM adds; now we can just drop packages like the one providing those instead of having to replace them with dummy packages to fulfill the dependencies or hack around them with additional packages. It also enables Pop!_OS server and decouples things that will make rolling out COSMIC Epoch easier, so it was really a win all around.
These guys are always going above and beyond to maintain the open source freedom we appreciate so much.