 Ok, hear me out. GNOME kind of messed up with their console application and I'm not saying that a GNOME developer is. Ok, so what's the story? Up until the release 42, which was released an entire year ago, the default console application for GNOME was terminal. This means that terminal was part of the core GNOME apps which are recommended to be shipped out of the box with a desktop. It frequently happens that this core set of application changes. As an example, in 2017 we saw an introduction of Tudu, Music and the Document scanner. Tudu was then removed on the next update and in 2021 G-Edit and Archive Manager were removed and connections was added. Usually this goes somewhat smoothly. Up until terminal. Terminal was removed in GNOME 42 and it was replaced with console. They do have in common that they use the same terminal emulator under the hood called VTE and this means that all improvements that terminal did to VTE automatically also apply to console. However, the interface of the Tudu applications was significantly different. In fact, working on a new application instead of trying to improve terminal has the benefit of being able to do radical changes while still allowing people to stick if they prefer with the other option. That said console isn't actually new. It has been renamed to console, but it was previously called KGX which is the station code of King's Cross. It starts with a K but whatever I guess. Whilst being incubated to become a core application it changed its name into console. The benefits of this application over terminal are that the former better follows the GNOME design guidelines and it's also way simpler. Yes, you can change color scheme between light and dark but terminal has actually full color customizations. And this was just an example but terminal also features minimonics, menu acceleration, different profiles, initial terminal size customization, cursor shape and blinking behaviors, scrolling options, custom commands upon startup, compatibility options and so on. Console has nothing of that. In fact, it doesn't even have a settings dialogue. In console we have the support for searching text, tabs, shortcuts, light and dark mode and that's it. However, finally enough, this would be the terminal emulator that I would actually use if I were to switch to GNOME as it's clear that it fits the design language much better compared to terminal. Especially evident if you look at the design of the terminal settings. And I don't actually need any advanced terminal feature when I use the terminal I'm just typing commands and not much more to be honest. And this is the whole point really. GNOME decided to replace a feature packed application with something simpler and that better followed the design. If you do need the more complex options, it will be very easy to just reinstall terminal and switch back to the old one. Easy, right? Well, not really because it went pretty badly. Two major distributions shipping GNOME by default Ubuntu and Fedora both looked at terminal and then they looked at console and they were like, you know what? This is actually a step back. I am not shipping this to users. All Ubuntu and Fedora releases since according to OMG Ubuntu have been using terminal and not console. It has been a year and Fedora decided to spend some time after such a long period of time to see if console had improved enough to change the situation. And to be clear, console has improved since one year ago. As an example, Libaduaita, if I am not mistaken, introduced a new tab overview component, which looks a bit like what you would expect on a tablet, which gives you a visual overview of all the open tabs. I actually absolutely love this feature on desktop as well. You still have the tabs on the top, but it's sometimes easier to just press the shortcut, see all of your tabs and recognize the one you want to switch to from the general look rather than the title. However, this hasn't quite convinced Fedora developers. They had actually opened some issues to the project, tracking the issues that they consider to be complete blockers and they are support for user defined color schemes, longer scroll back limit, ability to change the font size, option to disable bell sound. All of these issues were not addressed in the last year and these are just complete blockers. If console really wants to become a replacement for terminal in Fedora IS, it would need to also have things like toolbox integration and toolbox and distrobox titlebar color overrides. And this is where the main issue comes in. Console isn't really actively developed. It does not seem that the above issues will be fixed anytime soon, nor does it seem that anybody is working on fixing them. This is bad news for the GNOME project, since it means that their core application console won't actually be shipped into the two biggest GNOME dance. As I said in my Plasma 6 video, when your major downstreams revert your decisions, it's really really bad news and in the best case scenario it means you're a bit out of touch with the needs of the users. In a blog post published last week by GNOME developer Mike Hall Catanzaro, I hope I pronounced that correctly, it briefly goes through all the core application changes in the last 5-6 years before addressing terminal and console as the only time the switch didn't really go smoothly. It says, and I quote, Long story short, this core app change was effectively rejected by one of our most important downstreams. Since then, console has not seen very much development, and accordingly it is unlikely to be accepted into federal workstation anytime soon. We messed up by adding the application to the core before downstream were comfortable with it, and at this point it has become unclear whether console should remain in the core or whether we should give up and bring back terminal. Console now remains for now, but I'm not sure where we go from here. This answers the first of the three big questions that I want to raise in the video. That is, how are they gonna fix the issue, how can they prevent this from happening again, and what's next for GNOME core applications. So, how are they gonna fix the issue? They have no idea. I don't see a simple solution either. And to be clear, I'm not making fun of GNOME, it sometimes happens that unexpected issue arise and you don't really know how to address it, which makes the second question all the more important. How are they gonna make sure that this does not happen again? Well, basically the idea is that from now on, instead of swapping applications in and out the core category, anything that wants to get in there has to first go through a formal process called incubator. There is a super long list of requirements now to be part of the incubator. And I would expect that it will be much easier for distributions thanks to this incubator to know that a certain application will be introduced before that happens. And this will give them time to try it out and give some feedbacks on blockers instead of simply not shipping that application at all. Requirements for incubator apps are more strict compared to GNOME apps as a whole. As an example, generic apps can still use JTK3, whereas incubated applications have to be using JTK4 and Ibadwita, which finally brings me to the last question. What's next? Are there applications that are currently in the incubator and that realistically will be introduced as core applications anytime soon? And in fact, yes, there are a couple. The first one is called Lupe and it's an image viewer that's supposed to replace the current image viewer code named EOG. This app is in active development and ideally it should be introduced out of the box from GNOME 45. As the blog post says, the time for feedback is now. The second application is called Snapshot and it's meant to replace cheese as the core camera application. One application that GNOME is currently considering pushing out from the core set is Photos with no replacement. The idea is to have a content application that lets you browse images regardless of where they're located in the file system. An idea that's very similar to what mobile apps do and this idea didn't work really well, but there is consensus that Photos is still useful for the GNOME community. However, it is currently unmaintained and fixing its box was actually a factor that delayed the release of the Aurora 37. Since now we do have the incubation system, which does require active maintenance, this application does not meet that criteria anymore and because of that, it will be likely removed in the near future. Before I go back to my bad though, let me say that doing these videos ain't free and these videos are not sponsored. For this reason, I would appreciate it if you could throw some spur change at me to make sure I keep on producing them. I do have a monthly donations goal. I have Patrons, Kofi, LibraPay, PayPal and so on. If you do subscribe to Patron you'll be able to get also an exclusive sort of podcast and private blog posts, so that's cool. And that was everything from me. I hope you enjoyed the story and don't worry, GNOME is gonna be fine. See you in a couple of days.