Seeking to improve Budgie compatibility with the GNOME stack

[Ikey Doherty <ikey doherty gmail com>]

Hello all,

I have a quick few questions that I hope others may be able to help with here.

As some of you know, I develop the Budgie desktop [1]. In short, this is a tiny session binary, a GTK panel and "budgie-wm"
which is built on libmutter, with a modified version of the default plugin, default.c

One of the aims of the project is to keep tight integration with the GNOME desktop, and avoid forking. So, it kinda proves

what can actually be achieved with the GNOME stack without taking a butchers knife to it :)

I want to improve compatibility and I've encountered a couple of issues, notably when testing the GNOME 3.12 upgrade,
as we're looking to sync in Evolve OS [2].

It appears something has changed in gnome-control-center with 3.12 - unfortunately I only had a few minutes to do a dummy-run
on an Ubuntu installation, and well, we all know what Ubuntu+GNOME can be like... So I need some verification on this.

When running gnome-control-center within Budgie, there are no options in gnome-control-center. With Ubuntu it only shows the
stuff they jimmied into the package, but the GNOME stuff is definitely not there. Now, the session does lie and set the

DESKTOP_SESSION variable as gnome.

Is this something that happened within GNOME or is this the usual Ubuntu + GNOME + craq experience?

If it is, is there something I can do about this within Budgie to improve compatibility?

Secondly, gnome-music fails to start (Ubuntu tester informed me) - as its looking for the notifications interface, it doesn't
gracefully handle the absence. That's totally fine, really. What I need to know, given gnome-music attempts to tie in with
the screen guard, does GNOME use the freedesktop standards or are there some exceptions I need to be wary of?

Many thanks,
Ikey Doherty

P.S. I should point out that Budgie does not officially support Ubuntu due to the plethora of issues I've had in attempting
to support it, including those evil overlay scrollbars that entirely break grabbing within BudgiePopover and make it useless,

or the fact that giving an RGBA visual to a window results in a transparent window with the default themes, again breaking
the UI.

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[1] https://github.com/evolve-os/budgie-desktop/
[2] https://evolve-os.com/