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Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

material-shell.com

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Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#81
post #78

I like the tiling. Unfortunately it breaks my beloved workflow with GNOME 3: I'm using an extension to switch workspaces via scrolling on the top panel, which makes the workspace approach very useful and fast for me. I also rather would like the left panel at the top since window lists aren't important to me anymore (hot corner for overview is so much faster for me finding the window I am looking for)

Do you have a link to that scrolling extension handy? It sounds useful to me. And if you have any other recommendations I'd appreciate them too, as I tried some extensions but have none enabled myself currently (just stock with the animations off). Your scrolling one is the first one that sounds useful.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#82
post #39

I find the app-based window navigation in vanilla GNOME 3 rather frustrating, and try as I might, I just can't get comfortable navigating between what I think of as applications. This is because I have a few applications (Firefox, Terminal) that are really not applications in and of themselves; the applications are really Outlook, JIRA, Confluence, Slack, OpenShift (logged in as cluster admin), OpenShift (logged in a…

Perhaps as a slight work around for gnome-3 users. I use workspaces across two monitors with the `window list` extension. To address your 'X window is not in Y workspace issue' you can assign a hotkey in gnome to move the currently active window up or down a workspace.

So I have ctrl-alt-shift-up and ctrl-alt-shift-down bound to move windows up and down.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#83

My biggest issue with i3 and awesome is as soon as I plug in a second monitor the whole things just falls apart and it becomes too much to manage. Anyone try this with multiple monitors?

I've worked very hard to get my multi-monitor experience not to suck. In the end I landed on using this: https://github.com/lpicanco/i3-autodisplay This and a couple of scripts that run to change my audio output to HDMI when a plug event happens. I have to admit that I hate the "cobbled together" experience.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#84
post #39

I find the app-based window navigation in vanilla GNOME 3 rather frustrating, and try as I might, I just can't get comfortable navigating between what I think of as applications. This is because I have a few applications (Firefox, Terminal) that are really not applications in and of themselves; the applications are really Outlook, JIRA, Confluence, Slack, OpenShift (logged in as cluster admin), OpenShift (logged in a…

Very this.

My mind is not app-centric. I want the shell where I'm looking at logs, the editor where I'm taking notes, the browser where I'm checking some doc. I don't care to think about which terminal application the shell is inside, select that, then find I've opened a different terminal window and have to search through the windows separately. I don't care whether the doc is loaded in Firefox or Chromium so don't ask me to choose based on that.

IMO app-centric task switching works much, much less effectively than window-centric task switching; I hate that all the major DEs have copied the same basic app-based dock design that has been failing in obvious ways since day one.

(Although Windows can at least configure grouping away, and there's the dash-to-panel extension to make GNOME tolerable again.)

I get that an app-centric view is attractive to app developers, who would love me to be engaging with their brand. And that mobile has its own reasons for putting apps in silos. Does nothing for me as a desktop user though.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#85
post #57
post #39

I find the app-based window navigation in vanilla GNOME 3 rather frustrating, and try as I might, I just can't get comfortable navigating between what I think of as applications. This is because I have a few applications (Firefox, Terminal) that are really not applications in and of themselves; the applications are really Outlook, JIRA, Confluence, Slack, OpenShift (logged in as cluster admin), OpenShift (logged in a…

Doesn’t GNOME at least have a setting to change alt-tab to window- instead of app-based?

It does, but the fact that the default is so braindead and annoying, and that I have to configure it to make it usable, is well.. very annoying. Like, why would they think that it is a good idea? No other desktop does this.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#86
post #33
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally (1.5 years of usage) Gnome 3 doesn't crash.

The trick to not have gnome 3 crash (at least when I was on Ubuntu 18.04?) was to NOT connect it to heavy online accounts like if you have three google accounts all of which are perpetually teetering on the edge of your storage capacity of 15GB (or 17, if you did the security checkup) then the "factories" of Gnome will work themselves to death trying to synchronize everything. But we can't tell people "Just don't con…

I have it connected to 4 accounts with a lot of data/events, over ~3 years nothing happened. I did encounter crashes initially due to some nvidia driver issue :| and another time due to my ram stick, otherwise it's more stable than macos.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#87

As an i3-gaps user... I would try this.

I love how beautiful i3-gaps is. I worked awfully hard to get i3, Dunst, Polybar and many other tools to give me a WM only experience. And frankly, I hate that part of it.

Simple things like configuring bluetooth, or switching audio... or working with multiple displays are just painful. I expected this when I started using Linux in 1996ish. That was part of the hobbiest experience. These days, I just want to get my work done, and if I can do it with a pretty experience, I'd prefer that.

So if I do i3 again, it'll probably be with XFCE underneath unifying some of the experience. Gnome on the other hand, has its own set of issues that make it annoying.

So I'm with you, I would try this.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#88
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gtk3's title bar / hamburger menu / tool bar / modal dialog hybrid thing is a great motivator for avoiding Gtk3 apps. I've been pretty successfully avoiding them since upgrading to Ubuntu 20 and discovering that horrorshow. I'm having difficulty getting different colours on active vs inactive title bars on regular apps, though. Still working on it occasionally.

Why is it a horror show? It never bothered me

It's not, some people are just a little dramatic about it.
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