Hi Luciano, thanks for your thoughtful reply. On Sun, 2023-09-17 at 13:34 -0300, Luciano Santos wrote:
On Thu, 09/14/2023 at 17:36 +0200, Martin Wilck wrote:
The sooner the release gets used/tested by the general user, the more issues get uncovered by them and (hopefully) reported, at least in theory. The sooner issues get fixed, the happier users (hopefully) become, in theory.
All true, but while TW is for early adopters, it's not a beta test bed for upstream projects, either. But I understand it wasn't meant to be in this case, so that's fine with me.
I've been using GNOME 45 since alpha and haven't found any major issues myself. So, I can say the overall quality of this cycle is not that bad.
For people like myself, who are involved in extension maintenance on the one hand and must rely on a stable desktop environment for getting work done on the other, it would be helpful to have a well-defined and well-documented way of installing GNOME beta/RC releases (or certain subsets thereof) on top of TW, ideally with some weak promise by the TW GNOME team to help out if something goes wrong badly. Permanently installing alpha or beta releases, like you say you do, doesn't work for me. But I surely could temporarily switch to a pre-release desktop for the purpose of porting my extensions, if I could trust that it would probably not fatally disrupt my daily workflows. I've read https://en.opensuse.org/GNOME_repositories [1] but it rather discouraged me from trying. For example, it was not obvious to me whether just updating GNOME shell and mutter from GNOME:Factory (which is possible in terms of hard dependencies) would work or not, and I couldn't convince myself to update the entire desktop, including apps I really rely on. Thanks Martin [1] This wiki page looks rather outdated to me in general. For example, it still talks about the old GNOME 3.x release versioning policy. And the advice to "remove all of the extra and third-party repositories that you are currently using" isn't helpful, either. Yes, I know, it's a wiki and I could change the page myself. But I don't really feel knowledgeable enough for that.