GNOME Might Need To Crack Down On Their JavaScript Extensions

[davidbepo]

JavaScript is much the best performing and most stable interpreted language. Much much faster than python or ruby etc.
the solution is to fix the bugs.

/s right?

[kpedersen]

Your post implies that Wayland's design is fundamentally unsound. Would you care to elaborate?

The big one for me *is* that it is too closely bound to the applications. Causing an application to be able to take it out (Mutter, Gnome 3, Bubba's Cheeky Script, etc...).

The dealbreaker for me is that it isn't network aware, making RDP, VNC (Proper VNC sessions) impossible. The saving grace for me is that XWayland is pretty good and will likely outlive Wayland itself

Without starting an X11 vs Wayland argument, it simply feels like it has been created as a reaction, rather than as a full on replacement for X11. I am happy for both to coexist so long as people understand that they do need both and that a software isn't old because it doesn't "Support Wayland".

[andre30correia]

I want to upgrade my workstation for ubuntu 18.04, but gnome.... I need to teste a flavor or unity

[kpedersen]

The problem with GNOME 2 is that it lacks many modern features (such as HiDPI support, animations and flat theme by default). Also, is there any current distro shipping GNOME 2? (not sure whether to call RHEL 6 "current")

True I suppose but honestly HiDPI and "non flat" themes could have been implemented and improved many times over during the time it took to get Gnome 3 vaguely working for people.

"animations" are not modern. They are going to date so badly that in a couple of years we are going to look back and wonder why the hell we regressed back to Javascript mouse trails of the late 80s.

I am tempted to call any distro that doesn't crash due to trivial GUI application breakages, "Current". Otherwise I call it "Alpha". Solaris 9 with CDE is perhaps "Legacy" but I personally find it more stable than i.e Gnome 3, so I don't know what to believe anymore haha. I know far too many people (and my workplace) who are still on RHEL6 just because of the usable desktop environment. That seems like a bad reason to me but does start to make sense when you think about it. This was all predicted the day Gnome 3 came out however wasn't it? .

[starshipeleven]

OMG, the flames are raging hard in this thread... so beautiful.. (teary-eyed).

[Britoid]

A window manager shouldn't be able to load third party code, if it crashing brings down the entire session. That's just begging for issues. GNOME itself should not be the Window Manager, they need to split. What an awful design decision that seems to be just to "rush to get it onto Wayland"

Both Windows and OS X can do session recovery, so either recover the session or split GNOME and Mutter seems the most future-proof solution.

FYI I Use Gnome as my main DE, but I too am annoyed at its issues in performance.

[-MacNuke-]

The dealbreaker for me is that it isn't network aware, making RDP, VNC (Proper VNC sessions) impossible. The saving grace for me is that XWayland is pretty good and will likely outlive Wayland itself

Network awareness has nothing to do with RDP/VNC... It is not "impossible" with Wayland...

[oleid]

Network awareness has nothing to do with RDP/VNC... It is not "impossible" with Wayland...

Exactly, nobody is stopping you from developing something like xpra for Wayland. Wayland is only a protocol. Given some network proxy, that protocol can happily be transmitted via network.

[fuzz]

Why didn't they use something like WebAssembly?

Well, to be fair nothing like WASM was around. Ignoring compiled options, the main choices were basically Lua, Python, and Javascript. I believe Javascript was just getting hip at the time.

WASM is probably an ideal target for this, though. Now that I think about it, WASM might fit well in many scenarios where programs are extendable by extensions/plugins.

[oleid]

WASM is probably an ideal target for this, though. Now that I think about it, WASM might fit well in many scenarios where programs are extendable by extensions/plugins.

Maybe. But WASM (or any other scripting language) would have prevented the problem at hand. Monkey-patching the shell is the trouble.