Please backport Desktop Icons NG to 20.04

[XA Hydra]

After testing Hirsute for a bit, I am convinced that Desktop Icons NG fixes a large and frustrating usability issue on the LTS desktop. It’s a wonderful restoration of functionality that I still trip over myself expecting from “muscle memory” in 20.04, but being reminded that I can’t do simple things like drag and drop.

I have read some others suggestions to just install the extension oneself, and upon investigation, I found that it wasn’t a very clear process. Even Igor at dedoimedo.com had issues with going this route -> https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gnome-ding.html 4 .

For these reasons, I am hoping that someone out there (hopefully more than one) agrees that replacing the current desktop icons package in 20.04 would only help those on an LTS desktop. As excited as I am for the interim releases (especially concerning Wayland and Pipewire), I don’t want to move away from a well-supported release to have a desktop that we could have (and I feel should have) in 20.04. I know that some work would be involved, but I for one would be very grateful, for what it’s worth.

Thanks to all for your time.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

Questions to the desktop team:

* Can a package in focal-backports, which is not present in focal-release, be promoted to main?

* Can a main package depend on a package in -backports?

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

I don't think 'main' is necessary for this. It's not part of the 20.04 release series and shouldn't be because it's a major feature and still stabilizing/buggy (I'm working on it). DING can however be released to 20.04 'universe'. I don't see why not.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

When asking those questions, I assumed that changing it for everyone in 20.04 is an option under consideration. At least that's how I interpreted Sebastien's comment here:

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/desktop-icons-integration-problems/14577/22

OTOH, if we'd only backport the package without changing any reverse dependencies, I realize that "main" does not apply. Doing so would help a few, but most users wouldn't notice.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

That's not a definite comment. More recently than that we found a few bugs in the extension that I had to try and fix quickly, late in the cycle. It's my opinion that this extension does not yet qualify as stable so should not be considered for 20.04.x. It's not really even finished in hirsute so let's try to get it right in impish first...

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

It appears the main problem here is an upstream one: The extension does not support GNOME 3.36 used in Ubuntu 20.04. The upstream code only declares support for 3.38 and 40, while the GNOME page for the extension offers downloads for 3.30, 3.32, 3.34, 3.38, 40.

Please report a bug to the developer requesting support for GNOME 3.36:

  https://gitlab.com/rastersoft/desktop-icons-ng/-/issues

and then tell us the new issue ID.

[Gunnar Hjalmarsson (gunnarhj)]

On 2021-05-04 03:41, Daniel van Vugt wrote:
> That's not a definite comment. More recently than that we found a
> few bugs in the extension that I had to try and fix quickly, late in
> the cycle. It's my opinion that this extension does not yet qualify
> as stable so should not be considered for 20.04.x.

Thanks for clarifying. Indeed that speaks for only backporting it without enforcing the change for all 20.04 users.

Please disregard my noise above. :)

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

Proposed in https://gitlab.com/rastersoft/desktop-icons-ng/-/merge_requests/111

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

I tried and then gave up supporting 20.04. The reason is that only mutter 3.38 (Ubuntu 20.10) and later implements the API that the extension needs in Wayland sessions. You can load it in Xorg sessions on mutter 3.36 (Ubuntu 20.04) but that's not enough to declare official support. So that's another nail in the coffin for official support in 20.04.

You are still free to download and install the extension from source and use it in Xorg sessions on 20.04...

https://gitlab.com/rastersoft/desktop-icons-ng/-/releases

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.