Bluefin ‐ testing GNOME extensions after 50

[klmcwhirter]

The integration between the gnome-shell and the Wayland mutter compositor has been undergoing refinement.
Starting with GNOME 49 an additional package - mutter-devel is required to be installed along with gnome-shell,
gjs and glib2 packages that are already being installed by default on the bluefin:stable image with devmode enabled.

This change seems to be the first of many as the GNOME project has been working hard for at least 2 years on improving their architecture.

Because of this baseline assumption (more welcome, but disrupting changes are coming for GNOME) it seems reasonable
for me to rethink GNOME development strategies I adopt that are more future proof.

In addition to that, I developed over the course of my career an axiom that change in any arbitrary software system occurs about every 2 years. This means that if periodic maintenance (e.g., tech refresh) is not performed in even a production environment - things will eventually just stop working.

This is a summary of the conclusions I drew while thinking through the discussion taking place at #4246 - Nested Wayland session no longer working.

And so I began my next experiment.

Bluefin - testing GNOME extensions after 50

FYI

[klmcwhirter]

Oh, and I forgot about this statement from the 2025 Wrap-up blog post:

This new Bluefin is nicknamed Dakotaraptor and will be our attempt to ship a production quality bootc image based on GNOME OS.

Quote taken from the Bluefin's Distroless Future section.

Another good reason to get familiar with GNOME OS ...