Just a thing that bugs me and I need to let out of my system. We have:
GNOME settings - The default settings in GNOME
GNOME tweaks - More GNOME settings
GNOME extensions - for extension settings
Manjaro Settings Manager - all (?) Manjaro settings
Manjaro Notifications Settings - why is this one seperate?
Manjaro Gnome Layouts Manager - why is this one seperate?
That’s 6 different locations for settings (I don’t include advanced stuff like dconf or video driver settings).
I don’t have any clear proposal here and neither do I expect any solution - I just to point out that this feels really cluttered for a minimalistic DE like GNOME. But I can’t help but wonder… Can’t we unify the 3 GNOME settings in one (some custom patch maybe???) or at the very least the 3 Manjaro ones? Just thinking out loud, because this is triggering my OCD
They are different app created by different people.
It’s triggering you and that is fine. But it has it’s own reason.
All of them serve different purpose, for example some prefer plain Gnome without the need of using the Gnome Tweaks, why it should be baked together? It increases the app complexity and might not be worth the merge.
Manjaro settings manager is being worked on, and the new version will hopefully unify the different menus in manjaro-settings-manager. There have been also talks about integrating it into gnome-control-center, but we don’t yet know if is feasible.
Gnome project is working on integrating the functionalities of gnome-tweaks into gnome-control-center, but that is probably going to take at least a few years before it is done. It would have been nice if gnome-extensions had been a part gnome-control-center, but it is not, so what can you do with an upstream project
Gnome-layout-switcher is a home grown manjaro application. The reasons that it is not integrated into gnome-control-center are:
It is my first python application, the quality is not yet good enough for that kind of mixing.
gls is written in python, gnome-control-center in C. So I might need to rewrite the whole thing to integrate it.
I don’t know C, so I would need to learn a new language to even try it
gnome-control-center does not support plugins in the first place, so we would need to maintain the patched version that Ubuntu uses and deal with any potential breakage it causes, or maintain our own patch. Either way, the amount of extra upkeep work is not trivial.
Unlike Ubuntu or Pop Os!, we don’t have paid developers to do this.
Tl:dr:
This was the easiest way to do it, and we don’t have the required manpower and resources to do it differently at the moment.
Also the ‘layouts’ tool is more a utility.
You use it once or maybe again in the far future to automate configuring some desktop ‘template’.
I wouldnt really consider it a ‘setting’ anyways.
(maybe if gnome made it easier to add to its own settings utility it would be nice … but being separate as it is now does not appear nonsensical it me)
And what about Manjaro Notification Settings? That should be in settings right?
My opinion would be to at least merge the 2 above in Manjaro Settings. Not even sure if that’s definitely the right approach. I just want to avoid the KDE way of having million different things in different places
I mean that it technically can be done (And Ubuntu even does this afair). But there will be a work to support it afterwards and that’s not something we really wanna do.
I have looked at the code and have a pretty good idea of what would be needed. It falls pretty neatly into the territory of “can’t devote that much unpaid work to just this one thing”. It’s not not that it can’t be done, it’s that I can’t do it at the current situation.
Not all the time is available to use. I’ve sold about 40 hours/week of my time to my employer, and most of the the rest is co-owned by my spouse and family. So if significant amount of time is spent on something, it has to come from somewhere. Currently most my development time is coming out from sleep time, so that resource cannot be stretched too far. If it comes out of my work time, I need to have income to replace the lost one. If it comes out of the co-owned time, negotiation is much easier if it is work and not a hobby. Another option is to drop other manjaro projects to focus on this, but this would require more time than I’m currently spending on Manjaro.
Everything happens under the same user session, regardless if the acces to it is done trough one Application UI or trough Desktop UI. Would be ideal for me to have Inkscape, GIMP, MyPaint and Krita under the same Master Application UI when i do graphics? Maybe or maybe not. While for some it would look like with so many graphics dedicated software the system/desktop becomes cluttered, the same for others using just one application that has way too many options would be cluttered too. See Maya for instance when doing 3D and the learning curve for it …
Imagine a drawer for clothing. Shirts in one place, pants in another place, socks … etc. in another place. If someone prefers to store them by color, then the drawer needs a totally different design and functionality. To be optimal for one would be not optimal for the other approach. In both cases would be in the same room = as would be the user desktop …
For software, if the main UI breaks then is not possible to use any of the other “plugins”. Separating them is sain, as now it depends directly if the user session is working.
You can see to the bottom you scroll the page a bit and in the center there are two (unfonctional) buttons, one to go back, and the other to not sure yet
