Ubuntu 14.10 onwards: Convergence is coming...

[Adam Dingle]

Robert, thanks for your message.  Obviously all of these are 
significant projects, but the task "Replace core apps" at the end of 
your list would seem to be larger than everything else, depending of 
course by what you mean by core.  I'm still a little in the dark as to 
Ubuntu's intentions here: is the plan really to replace all core 
GNOME/GTK-based applications with Qt-based equivalents?  A list of all 
such applications could include

- Nautilus
- Totem
- Evolution
- Rhythmbox
- Terminal
- Calculator
- gedit
- Eye of GNOME
- Evince
- Shotwell

as well as the following, which are maybe used a little less often but 
still feel like core apps to me:

- Baobab
- Disks
- File Roller
- Seahorse
- Screenshot
- Simple Scan
- System Log
- System Monitor
- Transmission
- Yelp

If you replace all these apps with something else, I think that will be 
the largest change in Ubuntu's history - most of these apps have been 
around since the dawn of time and are very familiar to Ubuntu users.  
I'd go so far as to say that the new desktop would be pretty much 
unrecognizable to existing users, for better or for worse.

So: which of these apps are you planning to replace, and when?

adam

On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 10:32 PM, Robert Ancell 
<robert.ancell at canonical.com> wrote:
> With 14.04 wrapping up it's time to start thinking about what we can
> do with the desktop post LTS. I think there's one big theme we need to
> focus on - Convergence. All the Unity 8 goodness that is going into
> the phone / tablet builds is coming our way and we need to be prepared
> for that migration.
> 
> These are some tasks I think we could achieve between now and 
> convergence:
> 
> Task: Deprecate gnome-session
> gnome-session used to be the root process for a session. Now we have
> upstart/systemd that should be the root process. So no need for
> gnome-session.
> 
> Task: Put screensaver management into the shell.
> We currently use gnome-screensaver but upstream has deprecated it. We
> replaced the first part of this in 14.04 by using the shell to render
> the lock screen. We should be able to get rid of all of
> gnome-screensaver now.
> 
> Task: Put PolicyKit handling into the shell.
> We use policykit-gnome for the dialogs but GNOME uses the shell for
> this. We should be doing the same. A nice to have would be to
> implement this in both Unity 7 and Unity 8 but as long as it is there
> by convergence then we're good to go.
> 
> Task: Gut unity-settings-daemon
> We forked gnome-settings-daemon so we could stick with the version we
> have currently. Now we should start pulling out the plugins and
> migrating to the new services (e.g. power). Any remaining services
> need to be rehomed / made into standalone services. By convergence
> there should not be u-s-d anymore.
> 
> Task: Make Ubuntu System Settings [1] desktop capable
> ubuntu-system-settings doesn't cover a lot of the use cases that
> unity-control-center does. So we should add functionality to
> ubuntu-system-settings so that it first a capable alternative to u-c-c
> then eventually can completely replace it.
> 
> Task: Replace core apps
> Help get core apps in a state so that they can replace our current
> defaults. Candidates are things like calculator, file manager.
> 
> Are there any other good opportunities for us to start tackling?
> 
> --Robert
> 
> [1] https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-system-settings
> 
> -- 
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