GNOME Shell 4 Proposal Published To Be More Wayland-Focused

[Awesomeness]

Maybe they can make it less SystemD-focused while they're changing things.

I'm serious, not trolling, for the record. Not a battle of SystemD being good or bad. Just a general "DE shouldn't require a specific init system" argument.

The last remaining systemd contender is OpenRC and even its developers don't have enough confidence in it. It's still at version 0.x for a reason.

[Vistaus]

In a perfect world every application would be open source, but there is a massive amount of closed source X11 apps that will never see updates again.

I'm all in favor of open source, but open source doesn't mean that you will see updates again. If no one is interested or doesn't have the manpower in your source code, then you will not see any updates. Open source is good because other developers have the *possibility* to fork it and continue development, but there's absolutely no guarantee.

[horizonbrave]

Dear Gnome 4 Devolopers,
- could I please be able to close app/windows during my alt-tab browsing by just moving my finger from the tab key to F4 or the more traditional Q key while holding at the same time the already pressed ALT one?
- shouldn't be natural to be able to close apps when right-clicking on open apps icons in the dash?
- where average/normal users should forward/discuss eventual feature request.. doesn't Gnome has a forum?
I love Gnome but at the same time I struggle to understand it sometimes..

PS
who kidnapped the Ghost of Funk???

[Guy1524]

In a perfect world every application would be open source, but there is a massive amount of closed source X11 apps that will never see updates again.

[boxie]

If you think you can pester the whole world into rewriting everything for native Wayland support (and there's no indication to suggest you were joking), that's not funny to me. Putting a smiley after your statement doesn't magically make it funny...

fair enough.

and you would be amazed at the power of a little red icon (that I am not being funny about)

I agree though - providing this incentive for apps to be ported would certainly be divisive - to the point it would never get up. The thought experiment behind it is a funny thing.

[danboid]

One of the most disappointing aspects of GNOME 3 for me is that one faulty extension prevents the whole shell loading. Would any of these proposed changes prevent this being the case for GNOME 4, presuming it maintains a similar extensions system?

Somebody was asking about disabling screen locking under GNOME Shell? To do that I had to run:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.session idle-delay 0

[Tomin]

One thing they should do better (if there is resources of course) is extension development documentation. There is too little and too poor documentation to even start developing them let alone to create something actually useful. I know that there are many extensions, but I find it painful to create my own since the APIs are so poorly documented.

[leipero]

I agree. I like the drastic approach, but it's not very user-friendly to break extensions, which is one of the main reasons to use GNOME Shell in the first place. At some point breakage is needed, but it's better to do it at, say, 4.6 or so to give devs some time to update their extensions. That way, users would be able to keep the majority of extensions.

Well, that's why we have alpha, beta and so on stages, why not using it? Building something from ground up and letting things "stay for now" only makes you lose focus and make inferior whatever you are building in my opinion. Modular approach seems logical even for DE's core functionality (if trade offs are not way too much), starting anything from the ground up is a gamble, so instead of moving "final product" to point release, core functionality have to be done in beta, so point releases could be focused on features and other stuff (as it is now in gnome 3). Who knows if in 4 years from now wayland will be fully adopted? It might be, but it is also possible that drivers and applications would not move "that fast" and we could still have problems with it. But I sort off doubt GNOME 4 could be developed in such a fast pace, so it makes sense to start for wayland and throw a dice and see what happens, adding X support should not be a big problem considering experience with GNOME 3, and core extensions (if GNOME 4 even use extensions) should be developed with GNOME 4 as an testing ground ofc.

[halo9en]

If you're going to break extensions, maybe you should add the simpler and most popular extensions into the desktop. Just a thought..

*cough* dash-to-panel *cough*

[DanL]

am I not allowed to be funny?

If you think you can pester the whole world into rewriting everything for native Wayland support (and there's no indication to suggest you were joking), that's not funny to me. Putting a smiley after your statement doesn't magically make it funny...