Rework GNOME Shell's architecture to allow restarting under Wayland without crashing / taking down the spawned apps with it
Under Xorg, GNOME Shell can be restarted with Alt+F2
followed by r
and Enter
, and it can also auto-restart if/when it crashes, without affecting running applications. This is great.
The problem is that in its Wayland variant, GNOME Shell cannot be restarted without killing/crashing all the applications that the user launched within that session, and GNOME Shell cannot be manually restarted from the Alt+F2
prompt either.
For testing and robustness reasons, it would be desirable for GNOME Shell to be able to restart without killing the running/spawned applications in the process. Yes, in an ideal world, GNOME Shell could/should never crash or freeze to begin with, but realistically there are so many things that can go wrong (sometimes not GNOME Shell's fault per se) that it's better to architect GNOME Shell "defensively" so that it is resilient to such problems and recovers "gracefully" when crashing/freezing, so that consequences can be minimal for users. This is the number one reason that has kept me off the Wayland version of GNOME Shell for the past 6+ years, and yet I really would want to be running the Wayland version fulltime.
This was originally remarked downstream in Fedora here (a preliminary discussion had happened over there, but it unfortunately stalled): https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1367666 Since there was no upstream ticket about this (that I could find over the years), I am filing it here for any interested parties to keep track of, and for maintainers to discuss potential technical approaches towards a solution.