Gnome 3.3x

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.

@JoshStrobl let me know when you are looking at starting all the stack upgrades, I'll re-arrange some things and try put some time in with you guys to help with builds etc.

Nice short term roadmap.

Like the new site better than G+. Thank you team.

JoshStrobl I was worried about that.
Will you really meet deadlines? Q1

cantalupo555 Not really a deadline, more of a loose target. We don't do definitive dates.

Because goals you set yourself are good, and people like having a rough idea of the plans for Solus. Then there are idiots who think Solus is dead because they didn't see a blog post about future plans... no seriously, it happens.

cantalupo555 As mentioned by Harvey, it's healthy for us to provide goals on what we want to accomplish for each quarter. However, as we're all volunteers with our own lives, own problems, etc. we can naturally only dedicate the time we can, which means there may be periods of time where we're able to accomplish more than anticipated, and periods of times where we don't.

Our Roadmap is also important to us because it provides a sense of direction for ourselves and our community. The community knows what is (and is not) a priority and when we want to address it.

JoshStrobl Thank you very much.

moriel5 I believe there's a patch floating around to restore them.

Justin Hopefully Budgie makes use of such a patch, since usability is hampered for some users (me included) without desktop icons.

Yeah, I've kinda grown to like empty desktops (not cluttered with all the icons that spring up in Windows). I can pin the few I use frequently and the rare opportunities for others can be menu driven or cmd line.
Losing icons on the desktop would not be an issue to me at all...think of it as an opportunity to grow and try new things.

you're talking about not being paid to dev solus, so it's a very good occasion to ask what will be the new way of making donations ?

Justin moriel5

I'm not really sure what "patch" is being referred to, but we're going to continue to hold back Nautilus until either:

1. Budgie 11 (Most likely.)
2. I write a basic desktop icons view for Budgie in the Budgie 10 series. (Highly unlikely but not impossible).

Desktop icons aren't being removed. I don't use them but I'm also not going to regress in features.

I asked about Nautilus on on r/gnome.
And the reply from "bwyazel (GNOME Foundation)" was:
"Desktop icons was removed from Nautilus and placed into an extension, as it really is more of a shell-specific feature anyhow. Just to note, the extension is developed by the same development team as Nautilus itself."
"If you are using Budgie you can't use GNOME extensions, and the Nautilus icons are now moved entirely to the extension. So no, unless you use GNOME-Shell you have to use an older version of Nautilus prior to the desktop icons removal. Another option would be to use Nemo. Nemo is a great file browser and it still has desktop icons baked in."

You know, I never understood why desktop icons were tied to the file managers in the first place. It just makes no sense to me. Was there actually a good reason for it?

If I had to guess (which is what I'm doing), they saw that they had implemented icons in the file manager and thought the easiest solution was to simply enable them on the desktop using the same code/application.