Hi,
Gnome 40 logs into the activity/overview view. (but there is no activity at logon). The interest is to have the dock active as soon as the computer starts up with an empty desktop.
As the dock is on the ubuntu desktop and ubuntu has a real usable desktop where you can have icons, docs on it, do you think that it is possible/interesting to have an option allowing us to choose if we want the ubuntu session to be opened on the desktop or on the activities view?
Thank you for your attention.
A good point. This issue has already been discussed on the GNOME discourse:
GNOME 40 login is to the activities/overview mode, how do you disable this?
The GNOME developers seem to be strongly against implementing this as a standard option of GNOME Shell. So I don’t think there is a single chance on having this functionality upstream. Still, there already is an extension for this:
The issue has been raised in the recent Indaba.
Maybe it’s worth implementing this option into one of the standard preinstalled Ubuntu extensions, say DtD?..
The GNOME developers have recently refused the idea of having a choice when it was proposed last week. We are free to patch anything but at the moment I would recommend not patching this. In my testing, the legacy login animation (expanding desktop, no overview) appears to get too broken in GNOME 40/41 if you have dash-to-dock/ubuntu-dock loaded. But that might also be fixable if we can force the dock to slide in a little later (as it already does for the overview login).
To make matters more complicated, ubuntu-dock is a branch of dash-to-dock, and dash-to-dock technically does not support GNOME 40 yet (we ship a work in progress). So it’s branches from branches at the moment. I was hoping that situation could be cleared up before looking at any further dock work.
In summary, logging into the overview is vastly smoother and less buggy than the alternatives right now so I would suggest we don’t attempt to change it again until the 22.04 cycle.
@vanvugt: If the plan is to make it not log in to the Activities view in 22.04, I can think it’s unfortunate to ship 21.10 with the current behavior. Personally I don’t care so much, but to many users the first impression is a significant part of their experience. There is a wallpaper competition going on, and it would be a bit contradictory to distract the winning contribution with this GNOME idea instead of letting it shine. 
If it wouldn’t cause a lot of extra work, and even if it would be a hackish solution only for 21.10, I think it’s worth (re-) considering.
I completely agree. Unfortunately it would cause significant extra work which is why I gave up on it for this cycle.
The trivial patch I already wrote can be used to make it happen very quickly but the resulting stutter (made worse by Ubuntu Dock) is not something I found acceptable.
Alright, it’s wearing me down now… Despite the ugliness and the bugs, I might actually do this just so people stop asking for it. Now that we have bug 1940925 the discussion should move there.
I’ve also fixed the startup animation now so that resolves my concerns about the ugly login experience.
Thanks a lot vanvugt.
Now the session open on then desktop view when we use Ubuntu dock. It works nicely
