February was an incredibly busy month for me when it came to non-Solus matters, so I was unable to dedicate time to bringing our GNOME stack up-to-date.
Given the proximity of both Solus 4 as well as GNOME 3.32, you're going to see us go from a Solus 4 release, to an updated GNOME stack and a Budgie 10.5.1, to a Solus 4.1 likely within the timespan of a few weeks.
I had issues with an original PR from a Canonical dev to Budgie for support for GNOME 3.30 and they lacked any willingness to fix them and support older GNOME stacks / libmutter versions, which is an absolute must for us. Landing their patch would've actually broken it under Solus, so I opted to just reject it entirely and assess the stack upgrade and changes required when we were ready to cross the bridge (this was prior to 3.30.1).
This was also all around the time where we were dealing with the lack of communication from and subsequent sudden departure of the founder, lack of access to funds, infrastructure we were having to bring up, etc. Essentially it was an incredibly turbulent time and our primary focus was getting back on our feet and getting the ship sailing again.
So what that meant was the deferring of GNOME 3.30 until Q1-19. The intent was to do this in February but see above, I was busy and I can only volunteer so much time (nobody gets paid to work on Solus). Fortunately, the Ubuntu Budgie folks significantly improved the original patch and brought it up to 3.32 support. There is some minor issues around gsettings vendor keys and re-introducing some keys so we can both transition to Budgie 11 more easily and not break user configuration on upgrade, but overall I see very few issues that actually would block its inclusion after I bring us up to GNOME 3.32.
What this will mean is shortly after the release of Solus 4 and Budgie 10.5, we'll have a very short moment where GNOME 3.28 is still the current stack, then a slightly extended freeze for sync (usually we sync every Friday, that will likely get pushed back depending on the amount of changes and to ensure stability for stable users). During this time, Budgie 10.5.1 will get tagged.
After the sync to stable, we'll go back to our usual sync / development process, I'll give us a bit more time to work out any post-sync issues, then we tag a Solus 4.1.
