Welcome to the 17th installation of This Week in Solus.
We have benefitted extensively from leveraging the work of the GNOME Foundation, their contributors, and in the end the software they produce. However, the relationship with GNOME and downstream has continued to degrade and has made working with GNOME and its contributors difficult.
This degrading relationship has had the unfortunate drawback of valuable contributions from downstream, for example from the Solus Project, being rebuked and thus making it harder to innovate separately while leveraging GNOME technologies.
For the Solus Project and our demands for Budgie, this necessitates the further separation from the GNOME Stack and working with more willing upstreams. I’d like to summarize aspects that are in need of separation and improvements below. For the full issue report, view this GitHub issue.
In order to use GDM, you must also have GNOME Shell. For a downstream desktop, this means that in order to run GDM, you must also be running Gnome Shell on the login screen. This adds a massive amount of overhead for single-user systems. We intend on dropping GDM and replacing it with LightDM. As we need Wayland support for 2.0, this includes working with the LightDM team towards Wayland support (assuming they are receptive to this).
At one point in time, Gnome Control Center was more modular and extensible. However, GNOME has continued to integrate this further into the Gnome Shell Experience.
We would like to replace this commonality, potentially working with the elementary OS Team on improving and modularizing Switchboard so it may benefit not only Pantheon, but Budgie as well.
A simpler and more extensible API could be provided to replace the extreme dependency on org.gnome.Shell interfaces and enable usage on multiple platforms and for multiple desktops. Ideally we’d advise libdesktopsession and allow for both Wayland and X11 functionality.
GNOME has been showing preference of using JavaScript and Python for primary application development. While there is no immediate evidence Vala is to be deprecated, all evidence suggests no work is currently happening on the compiler front in Vala. We intend on deprecating it from the core implementation of Budgie while still enabling it for extensions.
We are happy to be releasing the first version of our comprehensive User Guide. This User Guide covers a wide variety of topics and is accompanied by images:
There are still a few things we are aiming for the second version of our User Guide and we’ll report more on it during the next TWIS:
You can download the User Guide pdf here. It is also linked on website navigation under Solus.
We have been continuously grateful for all the support from our community. As announced on our Google+ page, we are in the process of:
Here is a highlight of package updates that have occurred this week:
New:
Updated:
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