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.
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
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
I’ve been testing this in daily driving and have actually ran into some issues with permissions and occasionally stale state in the widget. If I get this resolved I’ll open the issue.
