Prefer Tailscale Status over Tailscale QS

Bluefin currently ships with tailscale-qs, rather than the more popular tailscale-status extension. I’m wondering about the rationale behind this, since:

  • tailscale-status has 3x the downloads on gnome extensions and 3x stars on github
  • tailscale-qs is unusable with larger tailnets as the node list is displayed by default, which causes the settings to be pushed off the edge of the screen and become unreachable
  • tailscale-status generally seems more established and mature, including the UI
  • both offer comparable functionality with tailscale-status possibly having an edge there as well (as per above, I can’t actually use tailscale-qs to verify because we have too many nodes! but, for example, it does not seem to support account switching or file-sharing and the status descriptor is less informative)

The one argument I can see for tailscale-qs is that it fits into the settings drawer. However, this comes at a price.

hmm ok I see in the original announcement that tailscale-status was used initially, but it’s not clear why it was left behind

Looking at the time of switching, F38 → F39 was when gnome moved to version 45 making a lot of extensions incompatible. Maybe at the time of releasing tailscale-status wasn’t ready yet.

Digging on the github side, seems they thought it was a better fit with gnome

thank you for digging up that issue, “better UX fit” (presumably fitting in the drawer) is a fair argument though the too-many-devices issue is still a deal breaker for me

will override-remove the -qs one for now and open an issue with them on fixing the node list, though I’m not sure if that UI component supports collapsible lists

it does look like there’s a PR for multiple accounts, which is the other blocker for me: Add support to multiple accounts (tailscale profiles) by sydro · Pull Request #27 · joaophi/tailscale-gnome-qs · GitHub

however it’s not clear if the maintainer is active enough to merge such changes, if that proves not to be the case I’d still advocate for tailscale-status for reasons of functionality and liveness

Yeah this has been annoying.

Someone file an issue and we can investigate swapping them out.