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Port to GNOME Shell

I've made the decision to drop GDE and replace it with GNOME shell. Here's some of my reasoning:

  • For technical reasons, GDE is stuck in GTK3, meaning that its performance is rather slow
  • GDE has a need for various jank to function:
    • wayfire dbus plugin
    • gde-gnome-bridge, which needs to be kept up-to-date w/ GNOME's fast-paced cycle
    • adw-gtk3 theme, which hurts accessbility
  • GDE has lots of missing features, which drive down carbonOS's quality:
    • Fingerprint login
    • Configurable keyboard shortcuts
    • Combined expo+scale -> overview
    • hardware-accelerated shell components
    • many of the dialogs: networking, (proper) portals, etc
    • no good screenshot functionality
    • no screensaver/lock support
  • GDE has lots of bugs, which drive down carbonOS's quality:
    • Broken NVIDIA support
    • Lock screen takes tens of seconds to come up sometimes
    • notification popups being cut off under panel until mouse hover
    • bluetooth toggle occasionally disappears
  • GDE is missing GNOME's enterprise backing:
    • Worse hardware/driver compatibility (less hardware to test on)
    • No active development on features like HDR, etc
    • Wayfire, our display server, is a small project. Thus it has a slow development cycle, and this has started stalling GDE development
  • GDE is stuck using lightdm, which means that without significant rewrites of third-party code it will always be missing nice-to-haves like flickerfree boot, easy switching b/t fingerprint/password/pin/smartcard, etc
  • I'm unable to keep up development on both GDE (keeping up with GNOME, implementing missing features, etc) and cabronOS itself

Things to do:

Edited by Adrian Vovk