Greetings!
We at Manjaro have a custom tool to manage kernels, drivers and locales. In xfce and kde manjaro-settings-manager integrates neatly with the system settings. I’m thinking of writing a new interface for it which would better fit in the gnome desktop. This leads to my question: does gnome-control-center support plug-ins? Something like creating new tabs or subsections in the gnome-control-center?
No, it does not; and, to anticipate your next question: no, it won’t either in the future.
The existing policy is: if you have downstream custom tools and components, you can also write a downstream patch for gnome-control-center that adds a panel.
Thank you! This was very helpful.
Kernel management means—I assume—having the list of installed Linux kernels and their options for boot management purposes. As for drivers, I also assume it’s a list of out-of-tree Linux drivers.
Those are kind of special-purpose features that would probably better have their own application.
The “locales” bit is interesting; I guess it’s an interface to enable/install language packs or locales; those are probably more interesting for the System Settings, but I’m afraid it’s a distro-specific thing—Fedora has language packs, Debian has locale-gen, etc. If a common, shared interface for generating locale data and installing language packs existed somewhere, I’m sure GNOME designers and gnome-control-center maintainers would be happy to use it, and expose it in the UI.
Yes, installing and removing kernels easily and notifying if kernel becomes eol.
It’s toggle between proprietary and free drivers
Yeah, these are features where it is difficult to implement a distro agnostic solution.
I took a quick look at the code. It seems quite friendly to patching in an extra tab or two. Problem is, we actually have a very small team and get most of our packages from Arch. If we patch gnome-control-center, we have to also start packaging it ourself, which would result in more development overhead.
This is probably the best solution for the moment. Thank you for your input and ideas!
You can try using Ubuntu’s gnome-control-center. They patched it so now it has support for plugins. They ship their own dock settings with it.
Interesting idea! The problem with using the Ubuntu patches is that we often ship more recent version of gnome than they do. We can’t hold back major software for long in rolling release, so when new gnome version is released, we would have to patch the new gnome-control-center before Ubuntu patches theirs. So, still a lot of work, although we might then be able to co-operate with Ubuntu and help them with their release also.
Thank you for the idea, it is also worth exploring further.
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