3 ms·

One of the things that has always confused me is that Gnome Shell is really extendible, from a programmer point of view. Even if you don't like Gnome Shell, yo

One of the things that has always confused me is that Gnome Shell is really extendible, from a programmer point of view. Even if you don't like Gnome Shell, you can actually start with mutter and build a window manager really easily (or, at least this was the case about 5 years ago when I last looked into this). Building Unity on top of Gnome Sell should be very straight forward. I'm still surprised nobody has tried to do it. Again, I haven't looked at it lately, but the last time I did, mutter was just fantastic. I was tempted to write my own WM on top of it, but since I have grown disenfranchised with the rest of the Gnome ecosystem (and it's hard to pull that out of mutter), I gave up. This shouldn't be a problem with Unity, though, as it is already entrenched in Gnome.

chriswarbo 10y ago
One potential problem is if Gnome make breaking changes, it's hard for Canonical (or anyone) to use it as a base for their own UI. I've not experienced this first-hand, since I haven't used Gnome or written GTK+ apps since the 2.x days, but judging by what I've seen online they like to break APIs at each release, drop working features if/when their opinions change, and be semi-hostile to any use-case other than their own default settings ("brand"), e.g. https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/ https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti... https://davmac.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/why-do-we-keep-building-rotten-foundations/ https://davmac.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/why-do-we-keep-build... I suppose Canonical are big enough to have their needs taken into account, unlike other app authors.
- mikekchar 10y ago
  This is actually the reason I gave up on my idea of working with Gnome Shell. But as far as I can tell, most of the badness happens before you get to Shell. Basically, Canonical has had to deal with it in Unity anyway.
Andrex 10y ago
> Building Unity on top of Gnome Sell should be very straight forward. I'm still surprised nobody has tried to do it. I think this is what ElementaryOS[1] did. It was funny/interesting to me that the "flashiest" features demoed on the website were pretty much just stock Gnome 3 features. [1] https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/

chriswarbo 10y ago

One potential problem is if Gnome make breaking changes, it's hard for Canonical (or anyone) to use it as a base for their own UI. I've not experienced this first-hand, since I haven't used Gnome or written GTK+ apps since the 2.x days, but judging by what I've seen online they like to break APIs at each release, drop working features if/when their opinions change, and be semi-hostile to any use-case other than their own default settings ("brand"), e.g. https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes/ https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti... https://davmac.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/why-do-we-keep-building-rotten-foundations/ https://davmac.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/why-do-we-keep-build... I suppose Canonical are big enough to have their needs taken into account, unlike other app authors.

mikekchar 10y ago
This is actually the reason I gave up on my idea of working with Gnome Shell. But as far as I can tell, most of the badness happens before you get to Shell. Basically, Canonical has had to deal with it in Unity anyway.

Andrex 10y ago

> Building Unity on top of Gnome Sell should be very straight forward. I'm still surprised nobody has tried to do it. I think this is what ElementaryOS[1] did. It was funny/interesting to me that the "flashiest" features demoed on the website were pretty much just stock Gnome 3 features. [1] https://elementary.io/ https://elementary.io/