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 -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
