A paint splatter, super-tired face, and a harp are among new emoji users of Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 LTS will be able to see and type after installing an update to the Noto Color Emoji font.
Ubuntu, which has shipped the font by default since 2017, is preparing to release an updated version containing the 8 new emoji added as part of the Unicode 16.0 standard.
Unicode 16.0 went live in September, introducing a total of 5,185 new characters, including 7 new emoji code points and 1 new emoji sequence to create the official flag of the Island of Sark.
The new emoji:
- Face with Bags Under Eyes
- Human Fingerprint
- Splatter
- Root Vegetable
- Leafless Tree
- Harp
- Shovel
- Sark Flag
As ever, the reason Ubuntu keeps pace with the Unicode standard is not to chase trends, appear cute, edgy, or appeal to an emoji-obsessed “yoof” demographic, as Canonical’s Jeremy Bícha explains:
Internet communication platforms quickly adopt the new emoji and it’s important that those emoji also work on the latest Ubuntu release.
Emoji are widely used online, not only in personal messages and social media posts but quite often in blog articles, e-mails, even technical documentation — and GPTs are prone to inserting them if asked to be friendly or informal.
Ensuring Ubuntu users can view and use the latest emojis is important, as an unsupported emoji can render as a nondescript character, potentially altering the intended tone of any text it accompanies.
For long-term support versions of Ubuntu — essentially fixed snapshots supported for up to 10 years through ESM/Ubuntu Pro — backporting newer emoji is doubly vital.
The new emojis will arrive via an update to the fonts-noto-color-emoji package (version 2.047). The update has been added to the proposed repository for Jammy and Noble and is expected to roll out as a software update in the coming weeks (if no issues are found).
Edit: Eek; whilst writing this post the package in proposed triggered a regression in another package, so that will need to be sorted – but with Canonical devs heading off on break soon, it may mean this update won’t be waiting in Software Updater this side of Xmas.
Hero image credit: emojipedia.org