Kevin's musings

A quick followup from my previous post about using gnome shell for a week from a sysadmin view. I got a number of responses on irc and via email. Some of them providing handy hints and solutions or at least work arounds to some of the issues I ran into. I am happy to report that everyone who offered me suggestions/workarounds/tips were very polite and many were in agreement that some of these were issues that should get fixed or implemented.

• There was only 1 extension compatible with 3.13.x, but mentioning that got at least one other one fixed, so then there was two. However, then rawhide switched to 3.13.90 and we are back to 0. 😉 One thing to note however is that there’s some extensions that are packaged in Fedora at least along side gnome shell, so those will always be available. Thats 13 of the very most common/supported ones. I’ve gone down to just using 2 of them: panel world clock and weather. 
• As many people pointed out, unchecking ‘Two finger scrolling” means enabling “Edge scrolling”. This isn’t very clear from the interface. Bastien Nocera was kind enough to file this (and several other bugs based on my feedback.:) https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=735148
• There was a fair bit of feedback on my laptop lid close always suspends rant. Working around it in logind.conf was popular. There were suggestions to just not close the lid for some of my use cases. logind.conf does have a ‘lock’ option which mostly will work for what I want. I’d really like to see some way to handle this in the UI however. Will try and talk to gnome designers and see if anything can be done. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=720295 was filed to make sure the touchscreen is off when the lid is closed.
• Someone helpfully suggested for dropping ssh key’s on screenlock that I could use a dbus-monitor script to watch gnome-screensaver. I’ve done so, and you can find the small script and .desktop file at: http://www.scrye.com/~kevin/fedora/dropkeys/ Additionally, Bastien filed a bug about adding this in a more usable way: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=735149
• The message tray rework I was reading about apparently isn’t going to land in 3.14, but 3.16 most likely.
• The Location item in the menu seems to be gone in 3.13.90, so I guess having it show location isn’t going to happen. 😉
• Adding an explicit UTC location for the clock: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=692243

As as side note gnome-session-wayland now works ok for me in rawhide. I’d probibly use that day to day, but the touchpad handling is still really primitive. There’s no tap to click or edge scrolling or 1 2 3 finger presses which I use all the time.