Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

I've lived in Awesome WM for years, this looks pretty good to me!

Trying this out as it's typed. For background: I really want to love tools like i3 or awesome, but I always go back to Gnome because it juts gets stuff done. I liked Gnome 2, I like 3.

So: just like the site says. Top is the taskbar, which also has a left icon for the current tiling pattern (fullscreen, tiled vertically, etc). The left side panel starts at the top-left with the search button that does the Gnome activities overlay, then a globe icon for each workspace, and a button to create a new workspace. At the bottom of the left panel are the system icons (normally in the upper right in Gnome) and then the clock, crammed into bottom-left.

So I don't hate the tiling, and one of the layout options is "floating" so you can have a workspace full of floating windows. Cool.

My first thought was that the panels are too big -- 48px, which seemed overly large. Luckily this is easily configurable in the extension settings, and updates as you change it so there's no guesswork.

If I switch to floating, or a new workspace, I appear to have no wallpaper behind the windows or the "new workspace" launcher. I liked my wallpaper, and I miss it.

I was going to complain about the globe icons for the workspaces, but it turns out it only preselected those icons because I have browsers primarily in each workspace. It'll pick based on the first open app (I think?) or you can override the icon by right-clicking, or have it display a group of app icons for the open apps in that workspace. This is cool! It's not quite the thumbnail previews of virtual desktops I had in 2004 with Openbox, but It works well.

I'll keep on this for a little while -- I really like that I can turn the whole shebang on and off with a single extension toggle.

Tried it briefly, I currently use i3 on ubuntu and found it to be much much slower than that, the animations while pretty get pretty jarring once u start switching windows too often. I much prefer the i3 style of just showing a blinking cursor on switching windows.

The grid layout is interesting but I found it strange that the all tabs are shown along the left side in split mode. It would be interesting to see how the grid differs from the tree layout that i3 uses.

I did like their default hot keys and the side bar for switching work spaces. Ultimately though if you don't like gnome this isn't going to change that. But if you do prefer i3 and want a more nicer environment with all the gnome system management ui's consider using https://regolith-linux.org/

I tried this a couple years ago on a Atom tablet. If memory serves it had no tiling yet, but I liked it because it was the only working solution that would allow a tablet-like experience under Linux, all others being either buggy or incomplete (rotation not working or not consistent with mouse, etc.). I admit it was well thought, beautiful to look at and very usable, although they didn't resist the temptation to dumb down even further the config panels by removing more and more options, which is the reason I avoid Gnome in all my PCs. The only real problem is that it was slow, I mean really slow, and memory hungry. OK, in 2018 having 2GB RAM it's the users fault, although that tablet was impossible to upgrade, so I had no other choice than either reinstall Windows 10 (which was a lot more snappy) or give the tablet away, which I did.

I seem to have read somewhere that an open phone manufacturer (Librem?) is using a deeply optimized version of Gnome 3 to overcome its slugginess on less powerful hardware. Are there any chances their optimizations can be merged back so that every platform could take advantage of them?

I use the Unite extension to have a more Unitish user experience, as I don't like the current Gnome layout