Hi Gerald, On Tue, 2014-10-07 at 07:06 +0200, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
Now that I switched towards using Factory for a fair amount of my time again (How's that for being brave? ;-) I made a couple of observations around the recent GNOME 3.14 update which I figured I'd share to hopefully make the experience a bit smoother for others and hopefully some improvements for openSUSE 13.2.
Observations are always welcome... but no promises given.
The good:
- Things generally work just fine!
Performance is fine, the UI fresh, some improvements such as sorting timezones in the Clocks applet (thanks Michael Gorse!), nm-connection-editor no longer referring to FirewallD (thanks Dominique),... have been integrated.
And, do not let this mail mislead you, please: I am not meaning to rant, and generally a happy user. Where things work, it's kind of hard to write a lot about it, though. That is why this section is the shortest of the three. ;-)
Right you are. Finding the positive things is more difficult, because that's usually 'what you expect it to be'. Nevertheless, I thank you for taking the time to still take the time to mention a few things before going to the negatives (I'm sure you had some manager's feedback training :P )
The bad:
- As in Gnome 3.12 already, every time I connect to a new wireless network, I have to enter the root password. This is a regression from openSUSE 13.1. Do you want a formal bug report?
Was an error on my side: updating the packages to 3.12, I lost a patch on the way (which, funnily enough, was about 6 months ago.. and only last week somebody reported it. gnome-shell 3.14, as is currently in Factory, has the patch re-enabled and functioning.
- Configuration loss: Going from 3.12 to 3.14 lost a number of settings, including the fact that I had "minimize window" and "maximize window" buttons configured via TweakTool. Setting these in TweakTool again under "Windows" fixed it for me, but why did this get lost? Do you want a formal bug report?
I'll have to check that one out.. probably some schema changes, moving them around.. not the nicest thing to happen.
- Configuration loss: Similarly, gnome-terminal which had been showing black text on white background forever, including the update from openSUSE 13.1 to Gnome 3.12, suddenly appear yellow on black or something after upgrading to Gnome 3.14. What happened there? Do you want a formal bug report.
gnome-terminal indeed switch to the dark-theme by default for itself. I myself, probably due to my age, have been using 'Green on black' for like EVER :) Gives me the nostalgic feeling of my first PC/Screen (which, as an anecdote, had a switch under the screen to toggle between 'green on black' and 'amber on black'.)
- Most of my Gnome Shell extensions stopped working, including "Media player indicator" and "Openweather". Trying to update these via TweakTool resulted in the button turning "Error".
That makes three issues here:
1. Gnome version update breaks extensions. 2. "Update" of Extensions in TweakTool does not work. 3. No useful error messages or other feedback for the above.
As extensions are not maintained by the package manager, updating gnome-shell will (unfortunately) always cause this to happen. GNOME Upstream is fully aware of that and is working out an update mechanism for user-installed extensions. For now, there is not much more I can say.
(Removing the two extensions and then reinstalling them by pointing Firefox to extensions.gnome.org worked just fine.)
The ugly:
- Being behind a slow and unreliable network for some days, I had to udate the system piecemeal and ran into missing dependencies on a package / package base ( http://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=899776 "gnome-clocks lacks dependencies: undefined symbol: gtk_application_get_menu_by_id" ). Luckily it was only this, or I might not have had a running desktop environment for a day or two.
As stated on the bug: rpm detects the library dependencies. The packager generally gives build dependencies (GNOME Team even versions the ones that are also checked on a version by the configure scripts). If it were up to the packager to add all libraries, a package depends on, manually and statically into the .spec file, I can basically only guarantee mess and disaster. A common practice on rolling distributions: only full updates are supportable (this is also valid for Arch for example). The bug is still open, and maybe somebody comes up with smart ideas (symbol versioning in the libs comes to mind.. for GTK, this is even in the talks (the main issue is the maintenance effort to ensure it is always true).
- Design: The upstream Gnome designers still force title bars that consume 10% of my screen height (yes, I'm exaggerating, only midly though) upon me.
Start a crowd-funding campaign to get funds for a proper screen!
Is there a better way to fix that than hacking title_vertical_pad in /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/metacity-1/metacity-theme-3.xml after every update?
You can install a custom theme in ~ and use this.. then at least it won't be overwritten every two days. Best regards, Dominique -- Dimstar / Dominique Leuenberger <dimstar@opensuse.org> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-gnome+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-gnome+owner@opensuse.org