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<div><br></div><div>- Nautilus</div><div>- Totem</div><div>- Evolution</div><div>- Rhythmbox</div><div>- Terminal</div><div>- Calculator</div><div>- gedit</div><div>- Eye of GNOME</div><div>- Evince</div><div>- Shotwell</div><div><br></div><div>as well as the following, which are maybe used a little less often but still feel like core apps to me:</div><div><br></div><div>- Baobab</div><div>- Disks</div><div>- File Roller</div><div>- Seahorse</div><div>- Screenshot</div><div>- Simple Scan</div><div>- System Log</div><div>- System Monitor</div><div>- Transmission</div><div>- Yelp</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>So: which of these apps are you planning to replace, and when?</div><div><br></div><div>adam<br><br>On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 10:32 PM, Robert Ancell <robert.ancell@canonical.com> wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite"><div class="plaintext" style="white-space: pre-wrap;">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] <a href="https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-system-settings">https://launchpad.net/ubuntu-system-settings</a>
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