Introduction:

I finally had some free time yesterday so I took the day to migrate my patchset to GNOME 3.16. In summary, it introduces the following behavior:

1. Reintegrates Power Management Utilities (pm-utils) Support
2. Triggers the display of suspend and hibernate buttons when holding ALT while in the system menu (top-right corner). However, unlike in 3.12 and 3.14 these buttons will only display if the user user can actually suspend or hibernate
3. Locks the screen when resuming from suspend if the GNOME Display Manager (GDM) is used
4. Disables suspend/hibernate settings in GNOME Control Center (Power) if pm-utils is installed but not supported

and, the following enhancements:

1. Restores Adwaita backgrounds from GNOME 3.10 (can now be disabled through the vanilla USE flag)
2. Reintegrates background transparency support for GNOME Terminal
3. Reintegrates dark theme support for GNOME Terminal
4. Disables all function keys in GNOME Terminal by default due to conflicts (can now be disabled through the vanilla USE flag)
5. Disables datetime changes through the GNOME Control Center (Date & Time)
6. Disables hostname changes through the GNOME Control Center (Details + Sharing)

The following quirk probably remains:

1. The system will not automatically suspend if the blank screen delay is less than the automatic suspend delay. This issue has been reported in multiple bug trackers, including upstream and still has not been completely resolved.

The following concern remains:

1. It has still not been confirmed if closing the lid of a laptop triggers suspend/hibernate.

Notable, changes from GNOME 3.14:

1. The dconf GUI that was enabled through the X USE flag has moved to the dconf-editor package. Users wanting a dconf GUI must emerge dconf-editor.
2. GDK is now the default clutter backend. This will result in programs, notably GNOME Control Center, failing to launch. As such, clutter must be built only with the X and introspection USE flags.
3. 3.16 has switched to libinput which handles mouse acceleration differently. Not everyone will be affected by this change as there are cases where libinput will not be installed. However, for those who are affected with this change, solutions include:
   • Fiddling with the mouse speed settings through the GNOME Control Panel
   • Running xset m default to get the previous default that was present in 3.14 and prior. To make this permanent, it can be put in a script and added to GNOME autostart or placed somewhere like /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/50-restore-gnome-mouse-acceleration.sh.

     #!/bin/bash
     
     # Restores mouse acceleration to the previous default
     
     /usr/bin/xset m default
     

Instructions for populating a skeleton funtoo-gnome-overlay (if directly merging is not desired):

Copy the contents of:

https://github.com/dantrell/gentoo-overlay-dantrell-gnome.git
https://github.com/dantrell/gentoo-overlay-dantrell-gnome-3-16.git

into funtoo-gnome-overlay, excluding the profile and metadata directories as well as any package that overlaps with funtoo-overlay, such as:

sys-power/acpid
sys-power/upower

Copy the excluded packages into funtoo-overlay, if desired.

Note: Utilizing the above source resolves the following issues for both GNOME 3.14 and 3.16:

1. FL-1687 (Wallapaper corruption when resuming from suspend)
2. FL-1688 (Nautilus bookmark rows on sidebar flickers when deleting a significant number of files)
3. FL-1694 (gnome-shell-extensions-3.14.1: Places status indicator opens Disk Usage Analyzer instead of Nautilus)
4. FL-1813 (GNOME: appstream-glib circular dep)
5. FL-1908 (gnome-terminal does not respect scroll bar placement setting)
6. FL-2312 (app-crypt/seahorse-3.14.0: with >=gnupg-2.1 installed, configure complains: "install one of versions: 1.2 1.4 2.0")
7. FL-2485 (GNOME 3.16)
8. FL-2568 (app-admin/system-config-printer-gnome-1.5.3: Gentoo removal)

Closing comments:

While GNOME 3.16 offers a number of improvements (mainly the revamped notification system) it also takes quite a few steps backs (I stopped counting at 10) when it comes to accessibility, aesthetics and functionality. These are not bugs but rather how the GNOME team intends 3.16 to be.

Some of these changes can be overridden through use of ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css while the rest must be patched out. Due to bad press, exactly 1 of these issues was semi-reverted and slated for 3.17+ due to a UI freeze. I personally patched a majority these issues before simply reverting to 3.14.

In short, the trip from GNOME 3.8 to 3.14 was probably gentle in comparison to the trip from 3.14 to 3.16 and so I strongly suggest that either GNOME 3.14 remain in the tree or that users are notified of where it can be obtained.

Reference:

FL-1329 (GNOME 3.12), FL-1637 (GNOME 3.14), FL-2583 (Change funtoo-gnome-overlay implementation)