System Settings Plans

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hi all,

Some of this was discussed at Boston Summit and has been mentioned on
Planet GNOME, but I thought it would be good to raise it here so
everyone knows what's going on.

There are currently plans for four new settings panels for GNOME:
Search [1], Privacy [2], Sharing [3] and Notifications [4]. These have
been on the drawing board for a while, and address fairly
long-standing gaps in what System Settings covers. The primary aims of
each panel are:

 * Search: allow users to configure which search providers are
displayed in the shell, as well as their order
 * Notifications: configure which apps can show notifications
 * Privacy: give people control over the data that they expose over
the network and to miscellaneous online services (among other things)
 * Sharing: consolidate our existing sharing services (vino,
bluetooth, rygel, samba) into a single settings panel

Search and notifications are being worked on as a part of feature
initiatives for 3.8 [5]. We don't have anyone committed to working on
privacy or sharing, but these are settings panels that I think will be
pursued in the future. Volunteers are welcome, obviously.

It is worth noting that the privacy and sharing panels have
implications for the existing brightness and lock and power panels.
The designs propose that the current lock settings should be moved to
the new privacy panel. We have also discussed a simplification of the
screen blank setting and relocating it to the power settings. With
these changes, the only thing remaining in brightness and lock panel
will be the brightness slider itself. I think it makes sense to find a
new home for that, and to retire brightness and lock altogether; it
has been a fairly constant source of difficulty for us and I doubt
that it will be missed.

Allan

[1] https://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/Search#Tentative_Guidelines
[2] https://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/Privacy#Tentative_Guidelines
[3] https://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/Sharing#Tentative_Guidelines
[4] https://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/Notifications#Tentative_Design
[5] https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointSeven/Features/