I want Gnome 40! Why doesn't Manjaro ship Gnome 40 Shell yet?

[philm]

Development images are always available to see what the current progress is.

[Chrysostomus]

@MiuK

I’m about to post a controversial idea.
Have you thought about phasing out most of the Manjaro customization crap and stick with with upstream default GNOME and a slightly color-changed variation of Adwaita+wallpaper.

This is an valid opinion, and something we consider at least twice a year when there is a major gnome update.

The benefits are significant:

• more stable desktop
• quicker release schedule
• better performance
• less effort

There are some downsides also though:

• many Manjaro gnome users would not use gnome without customizations
• the customized gnome shell is one of the differentiating factors of Manjaro. For vanilla gnome experience, Fedora and Arch do already really good job.
• gnome experience really benefits from certain extensions. For example, dash-to-dock reduces the required pointer travel significantly and makes gnome much more mouse friendly.

So, for a long time we tried to compromise between these positions. With gnome-layout-switcher, the extension library has grown a bit out of hand. It usually doesn’t get this bad, with gnome40 it was to be expected.

[Riggs]

I use Manjaro Gnome traditional layout, my wife stay on Linux because that.

Edit: Another Desktop could be used, like Plasma, but is heavily bloated kdWhatever all over the installation, that is not Manjaro issue, is KDE fault.

[MiuK]

@Chrysostomus

There are some downsides also though:

• many Manjaro gnome users would not use gnome without customizations

Thats probably not bad. There is no need to revamp GNOME and not even wanted by the devs. There are other desktops who do the job just fine be default.

• the customized gnome shell is one of the differentiating factors of Manjaro. For vanilla gnome experience, Fedora and Arch do already really good job.

Fedora is not Arch based and Arch is not that easy to install. Both of them don’t compare to Manjaro. Maybe EndeavourOS, I dont know

• gnome experience really benefits from certain extensions. For example, dash-to-dock reduces the required pointer travel significantly and makes gnome much more mouse friendly.

That depends. I dont think that certain extensions are wrong or anything. Just a distro who depends that much on outside sources to keet up the work as well as that much changes made on upstream work that it is stuck to an old versions for that long.

[MiuK]

@freggel.doe

If you follow through on that line of thought, gnome 40 would not arrive any sooner in stable - the incompatibilities would still be there and this

For 40, yes. But for following releases it would speed up everything by a lot because it’s mostly upstream already.

@freggel.doe

still needs to work on systems where it was installed.

That’s exactly the problem. It will not get better in the future and I doubt that at some point Manjaro will maintain all the extensions themself because upstream devs will not do this anymore and Manjaro was shipping them at some point.

[freggel.doe]

@MiuK

But for following releases it would speed up everything by a lot

No it won’t.
All the manjaro customizations would still need to be fixed/adjusted and gnome packages could not be pushed out any sooner because this would break existing installations.

[Chrysostomus]

If we moved to more vanilla gnome experience, it would need a lengthy enough transition period. But after that, yes, it would speed things up significantly. It would also mean that people would rely on upstream directly for the extensions, and they would break twice a year.

[kerry_s]

i just did a minimal+gnome on my rpi400 & it’s working perfectly, i’m using xorg.
with the manjaro version from the manjaro-arm-installer, it was very bad, slow, double icons, text on top of text.

Uploading: Screenshot from 2021-05-19 11-35-41.png(1)…

[kogli]

Hello,

is there a way to update to the gnome 40 versions of all the held back packages without switching to unstable branch, i.e. without updating any other packages?

Thank you.

[Fofry]

I don’t mind waiting (reasonably long) and understand how difficult the situation is for the Manjaro team.
That said, I don’t think people who want customization over everything else go with the GNOME edition. There’s Plasma & Xfce for those people. I’d much rather have quick updates & bugfixes with green-ish Adwaita clone and minimal extensions, rather then often half-baked themes & a bunch of extensions I don’t really use.

[Mirdarthos]

Again,

@philm

Development images are always available to see what the current progress is.

[kogli]

Was this response targeted at me? If so, it’s not really what I’m looking for. Rather, I’m looking for a way on my system to upgrade to the gnome 40 packages from the unstable branch. but keep all other packages from the stable branch. Can this be done?

Thank you

[xabbu]

@kogli

I’m looking for a way on my system to upgrade to the gnome 40 packages from the unstable branch. but keep all other packages from the stable branch. Can this be done?

No, either update all packages or nothing.

[iiari]

@kogli

Rather, I’m looking for a way on my system to upgrade to the gnome 40 packages from the unstable branch. but keep all other packages from the stable branch.

I actually almost got chills reading that. The recipe for instability and trouble that represents is huge. Trust me, try it on a dev build first…

[Mirdarthos]

@iiari

got chills

Are they multiplying? Did you lose control?

[tomasalles]

Any news? Does anyone know when will manjaro have gnome 40?

[Chrysostomus]

We were almost ready to release, but then there was a surprise regression from pop-shell and dash-to-dock. We are not waiting for pop-shell to work because the devs are not targeting the version of libraries we have (they use Ubuntu base, and Ubuntu is sticking to the 3.38), but we are trying to get dash-to-dock working before the release, because otherwise we have to drop gnome-layout-switcher.

[AlanP]

@Chrysostomus: Damn. Gnome (shell) 40 doesn’t want to come out under Manjaro (laugh).

Hope it will be available soon. I’ve got all my extensions for Gnome 40 ready.

Thanks to you and Manjaro Team for your work.

[Chrysostomus]

All the extensions are working for me too. The issue happens only with the first user created by calamares on the installed system. It is not present for live system or users created after the installation.

[AlanP]

@Chrysostomus: The ‘Dash to Panel’ extension available by default in Manjaro Gnome are made by Manjaro Team or come from GNOME Shell Extensions website ? Under Gnome 3.38, I encountered this problem with Wayland.
I’m waiting Gnome 40 and the ‘Dash to Panel’ 42 version from Manjaro Gnome to see if this problem is still present.

Regards.