GNOME 3.36 Stack Upgrade Notes

WARNING: Please read this task in its entirety before commenting or upgrading.

New year, new GNOME Stack upgrade. As is tradition from the last couple stack upgrades, I'm opening up a task for everyone to report their issues with the GNOME 3.36 stack upgrade. It's absolutely important we maintain focus on reporting issues which are specifically related to this stack upgrade so we can best work to helping validate and resolve these issues. I welcome you to post a comment if an application is suddenly not working and you strongly believe it is the result of the new stack upgrade, such as it suddenly missing libraries or ones which may warrant a rebuild. If necessary, we may request you file a separate issue so we may obtain further detailed information, which we (Core Team, Global Maintainers, Triage Team) can reference in this task.

NOTE: This task content can only be modified by members of the Core Team or Global Maintainers. We will update the task as comments / feedback are received.

The objective of this task is to facilitate technical discussions around changes which have occurred in the GNOME Stack, such as:

Changes to Budgie Desktop (if something is blatantly broken however that is part of budgie-desktop , that should be filed on its dedicated issue tracker). Budgie Desktop changes at this time are primarily around new Mutter support and a few bug fixes.

, that should be filed on its dedicated issue tracker). Budgie Desktop changes at this time are primarily around new Mutter support and a few bug fixes. Changes to GNOME Shell

Flatpak and xdg-desktop-portal packages have been updated and likely need more testing than what I have done

Geolocation (updated geoclue so if I need to add software to our default config besides redshift, I can)

GNOME Applications

This testing is being performed on the unstable repository and may also involve or require real-time communication via our development IRC channel. If you are not in IRC, use any supported IRC client that we provide in the repo (e.g. Hexchat, weechat, irssi, Konversation) and look at our Getting Involved Page for connection details.

If you are not on the unstable repository and wish to help test, assuming you understand that the intent of unstable is to be the place where we break stuff and operate under the assumption you check IRC to know when not to update, you can run the below mentioned command to switch to the unstable repository:

sudo eopkg ar Solus https://mirrors.rit.edu/solus/packages/unstable/eopkg-index.xml.xz

Upgrading Properly

Do not run any commands until you fully read this section. Thank you.

I cannot stress enough the importance of ensuring you upgrade properly and fully. If you are not on unstable already, you should fully upgrade your system by opting in to every package update available via the Software Center or running sudo eopkg up then reboot before switching over to unstable.

If you are on the unstable repository, likewise perform a full upgrade via either the Software Center or the Terminal, then reboot.

If you are using GNOME Shell, be sure to disable any extensions which we do not provide / have enabled out-of-the-box. Otherwise you may have a completely broken GNOME Shell experience, or worse it'll crash and you'll have to go through loads of hoops such as hand modifying dconf key values and nuking some extension contents, etc. It is not my responsibility nor the responsibility of GNOME to ensure those extensions are maintained and updated against newer GNOME Shell APIs. If they break, you'll need to talk to the extension developer.

Also ensure you are not updating the extensions we support and directly provide, such as Dash to Dock, through any software such as GNOME Tweaks or extensions.gnome.org. It may result in a broken installation.

Known Issues or WIPs

GNOME Shell

As with any desktop environment, there are wide range of issues with GNOME Shell. I would advise checking https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/issues before reporting them to me. If there is a patch and we don't have it yet, I'll get it added.

GNOME Terminal

GNOME Terminal made some changes when adding a "Preserve Working Directory" option, which is accessible in your Terminal's Profile under the Command tab. During my testing, it was defaulting to / (yes, as in the root directory) instead of my ~ (home directory). The default option been patched to be "always" preserved which should resolve it for ZSH users, but I'd like additional validation from various shell users (e.g. bash, dash, fish, zsh).

Deprecations / Held Back

There are several deprecations and packages held back (permanently) this cycle.

Deprecations:

Various docs packages that are very unlikely to be used and not worth the extra effort to keep enabled.

midori: Not actively developed and primary developers (elementary) no longer actively contribute but use Epiphany instead. A browser needs to keep using modern web standards, modern web engines, and provide modern feature sets. Midori does not do that and to improve maintainability of the stack in the long-term as well as ensure a better browsing experience, it has been deprecated.

pantheon-files and pantheon-terminal: Never actively maintained or for any reasonable period of time and I'm tired of having to update them every time I upgrade the GNOME Stack. They've been permanently deprecated from the repo.

Held Back:

Due to libhandy library requirement, which we're not allowing into the repo (it's a mobile-focused graphics library being shoehorned into GNOME apps), the following packages are held back to their last pre-libhandy release: epiphany, geary, gnome-calendar, gnome-clocks, seahorse.

Testing List

Testing Notes:

This list may not be comprehensive. Feel free to report other things! Phabricator may indicate something is complete even if it isn't explicitly checked off. Ignore that and only look for the checkbox. There are numerous sections within GNOME Control Center (Settings) that are only applicable to GNOME Shell. If something does not work under Budgie, it does not necessarily mean that functionality is actually broken, but rather it may be the unfortunate result of the functionality targeting a specific desktop environment.