Re: Module Proposal: GNOME Shell

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

On Sat, 2010-04-03 at 09:56 -0400, Jamie McCracken wrote:

> This leads to some important questions: 
> 
> 1) Will Gnome have the ability, by default, to auto-detect which
> panel/shell to use based on the available hardware?

This is a little hard to do at the GNOME level, because it depends on
what drivers are available on a particular system. But hopefully we can
provide framework components for distributions to build upon in this
area.

> 2) Will the new shell significantly affect power consumption compared to
> the panel? Should panel be default if it does for battery powered
> devices?

I don't expect the shell to significantly affect power consumption. But
even if it does and we can't fix it, we still can't use the panel for
battery powered devices. With increasingly rare exceptions, computers
simply are battery powered devices. "desktop computers" are no longer
normal. The GNOME 2 Panel does not provide the GNOME 3 experience.

> 3) Given that gnome-panel will be around for a long time, will there be
> any possibility of sharing applets between gnome-shell and gnome-panel? 

The shell doesn't really contain any straight-up equivalent to GNOME
panel applets as a user-interface concept.

- Owen