Re: What does gnome-shell give us?

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 3:04 PM, Sandy Armstrong <sanfordarmstrong gmail com> wrote:

Hey folks,

Taking a step back from the excitement over shiny new things, I was
just wondering if somebody could give a few bullet points that explain
what gnome-shell gives us over our current desktop experience.  I feel
like there's a lot of stuff that's different or missing but I'm not
sure I'm understanding where it's "better".  

Also, I would subdivide "better" into "better right now",  "better once bug 12345, bug 12346... are fixed", and "i don't see how this could ever work for me".

We certainly have some serious regressions right now, the application browse in particular is really unloved, but it's also among the things we'll be working on quite soon.  I could absolutely understand if you were saying "not better right now" (for me personally it's in the middle state, a few bugs are fairly bad).  But if you're saying something closer to the latter that's more of a concern.

Also a few other goals to the list:

* Actual design for how workspaces behave (We didn't really have this in any consistent way, but now is an opportunity to fix it right, e.g. make moving an application to a workspace a persistent operation, etc.  Actually a lot of cool things are enabled when we have an application based system)

* Help push forward the technology stack by being a consumer of Clutter, introspection etc., including hopefully providing a motivation for graphics drivers