On Thu, Nov 10, 2022 at 01:35:36AM -0000, Scott Anecito via devel wrote:
What is the driver for choosing Phosh over GNOME Shell?
There's no choosing something over something else. This isn't a Fedora
Mobility Edition, but rather a first look at a Phosh based setup.
Phosh has been around a long while, the remix that the mobility sig
makes currently uses it, and it seems to be making progress all the
time.
The plasma mobile desktop has also been around a while, but I am not
sure if it's all packaged up yet or how it fits together. The kde sig
has been working on this. If they reach a point where things are
working, they can submit a plasma-mobile change.
If down the road we think this area should be covered by a edition, then
we would need to closely decide what would meet our users needs.
Let me first say the amount of work put in by both Purism and the
GNOME community into Phosh and other mobile components like libhandy has been critical to
Linux mobile space. While mobile friendly GNOME Shell improvements only recently started
and is not currently as feature rich as Phosh, the recent focus on it by the GNOME
community has lead to some fast and impressive development as seen on the GNOME blog:
https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2022/09/09/gnome-shell-on-mobile-an-upd...
Most of the changes in the blog look to be targeting merging upstream in time for
44's release which I believe would be in Fedora 38. Even then though GNOME Shell
wouldn't be at feature parity with Phosh. However, the main argument long term for
having a mobile image that uses GNOME Shell over Phosh is more resourcing due to mutual
benefits on mobile and desktop with things like the new gesture API referenced in the
blog.
gnome-shell's mobility changes look really interesting and I would
encourage folks interested in that to work on a gnome mobility spin?
If feature set is the driver, I understand, but as a Librem5 owner
and someone with all their boxes imaged with Fedora I'd be curious if there would be
any plans to eventually switch to GNOME Shell once feature parity happens.
I don't know of any plans right now, but I think it's likely to happen
if things are merged and are in a workable state. :)
kevin