GNOME Shell 4 Proposal Published To Be More Wayland-Focused

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GNOME Shell 4 Proposal Published To Be More Wayland-Focused

Jonas Adahl of Red Hat has volleyed his initial proposals for how a "future" GNOME Shell could be architected on a page entitled GNOME Shell 4. This GNOME Shell 4 would potentially break compatibility with GNOME Shell 3 extensions while being more designed around Wayland rather than X11...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNOME-Shell-4-Proposals

[kmare]

At the moment, GNOME Shell is working just fine for me and I don't have the slow down issues some people are reporting. But it's obvious that there are architectural issues that need a fresh re-implementation. I really like the first proposed design and I feel like it can't come soon enough. A big thank you to all the developers!

[leipero]

kmare First more drastic approach is probably the right way of doing things, maybe it is better to do it a bit slower but properly than fast solution that might introduce other problems in the future.

[DanL]

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

[hrkristian]

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

There ought to be a paradigm shift in how modifications are handled IMO. Away from extensions and towards native code. extensions are just too damn slow. The 7 or so extensions I'm using more than doubles start-up time.
The community, not the core devs, should be pushing patches and exposing them through Tweak Tool. Problem is the core devs probably aren't interested in that kind of influence, but they ought to be.

Which isn't to say extensions should be trashed, but as you say the popular extensions have earned a permanent place as native code. Why am I adding/updating something as simple yet essential as Caffeine through extensions.gnome.org while the Power section of Tweak Tool contain one frickin' entry?

[starshipeleven]

GNOME breaking all extensions isn't exactly news, nor a major issue imho.

That said, I'd take "complete rewrite with Wayland in mind, fuck extensions" over "half-assed thing but we don't break extensions too much" any day.

If GNOME (backed by RH) isn't boldly spearheading into the unknown, who does?

[leipero]

Which isn't to say extensions should be trashed, but as you say the popular extensions have earned a permanent place as native code. Why am I adding/updating something as simple yet essential as Caffeine through extensions.gnome.org while the Power section of Tweak Tool contain one frickin' entry?

What I do not understand is why people even use Caffeine extension? I saw few posts of people claiming that sleep mode doesn't work well, and that might be the case, but rather than using some extensions for that problem, it would be much better to fill proper bug report and improve shell.

Obviously, I never had that problem, auto-suspend and blank screen (sleep mode for screen) is working properly for me, and that is part of power management in GNOME 3, so having extension for it is kinda pointless (fixing bugs, if any is the right thing to do).

[Anvil]

i like this idea, getting rid of x-11 crap an just using Wayland/Xwayand . if Extensions have to be ReWritten to fit into the new Shell, im all for it. , the question is, would it make Maintenance on Extensions easier less painfull ?

[hrkristian]

What I do not understand is why people even use Caffeine extension? I saw few posts of people claiming that sleep mode doesn't work well, and that might be the case, but rather than using some extensions for that problem, it would be much better to fill proper bug report and improve shell.

Obviously, I never had that problem, auto-suspend and blank screen (sleep mode for screen) is working properly for me, and that is part of power management in GNOME 3, so having extension for it is kinda pointless (fixing bugs, if any is the right thing to do).

Uhm... Caffeine stops your screen from blanking in the first place, that's the point. I have a 5 minute time-out, and sometimes I want to set it to "never" without having to go into settings; enter Caffeine, one click on the status bar and I have achieved just that.

[eddie]

I'll add that, if they still decide to continue with the approach of building out Shell and its extensions via a JavaScript engine, I'd hope that they at least switch to Kotlin/JS or TypeScript to define the APIs. As it stands I actually have never been able to find proper API documentation at all. Of course, an even better solution would be to pick a language-agnostic IDL, but that might be hoping for too much.