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Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

material-shell.com

141–150 of 271 posts

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#141
I switched from i3 to bspwm and never looked back. It’s more true to the Unix philosophy of doing one thing only and doing it well. I use sxhkd for the hotkey daemon and polybar for the status bar. It’s more initial work to set up though than i3 which just works out-of-the box which makes i3 good enough for most people.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#142
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…

I recently switched to Sway because gnomes workspaces annoyed me too much. Let me choose a workspace independently on each monitor please! On i3 I was getting really bad screen tearing, even with conpton/picom otherwise I’d have just used that, but Sway/Wayland has no such problems. Sadly a few things don’t work so well in Wayland. For example, Windows games under Proton work fine on X but not on Wayland/Xwayland (I…

Another annoying breakage in Sway is Android Studio. Submenus appear in random places on the screen even with _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#144
post #90

Reminds me of the 10/GUI ("contenuum") http://10gui.com/ A user interface mockup where everything is grouped, spatially oriented, and scrollable. https://vimeo.com/6712657

I had the exact same thought - I think it was the video presentation style, more than the actual UI design itself though.

I'm still waiting for 10gui to break the shackles of our "4-finger" multitouch world

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#145
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's interesting. Microsoft agreed with this philosophy and fought tooth and nail against tabbing in browsers, opting instead that each browser tab be it's own window and accessible from the task bar. After all other browsers had switched, they were forced to introduce that in IE as well. The worst offender here is OSX. I still haven't figured out a good way to switch between multiple open windows of the same applica…

I've found https://contexts.co/ to be the best solution for OSX. It wont let you ⌘+tab through the browser tabs but if you have multiple windows of the browser open you can see them individually.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#146
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.

"Use this gnome 3 extension" is never the answer to work around gnome 3 problems: in my experience extensions either don't work or stop working at the first 'apt-get update' you do, or just consume like 40 gigs of memory if left running for a week. Extensions are the devs way of saying "we don't care about you, but we're going to pretend to care by allowing you to write software that we're going to break".

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently switched to Sway because gnomes workspaces annoyed me too much. Let me choose a workspace independently on each monitor please! On i3 I was getting really bad screen tearing, even with conpton/picom otherwise I’d have just used that, but Sway/Wayland has no such problems. Sadly a few things don’t work so well in Wayland. For example, Windows games under Proton work fine on X but not on Wayland/Xwayland (I…

Another annoying breakage in Sway is Android Studio. Submenus appear in random places on the screen even with _JAVA_AWT_WM_NONREPARENTING=1.

Oh, yeah, I did notice some glitches with Java applications like DBeaver.

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#148
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…

It rarely affects me. I'd say 99% of my time in Gnome is spent in either Firefox or terminal.

Suddenly I'll need a program so I hit windows key, type in the start of the program name, and smash the Enter key. It's super simple. What's the problem?

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#149

The word "modern" is really overused in tech, and it doesn't really tell you all that much, just that "this is better because it's new, and new stuff is better than old stuff". Consider a more descriptive word, such as: - minimal - streamlined - sleek - simple - opinionated - spatial - comprehensive etc...

How about providing an explanation for those words?

- minimal: limited features set aka either you like it in 10 seconds or you don't

- streamlined: good looking?!?

- sleek: combination of streamlined and minimal?

- simple: IMO even more overused than 'modern' and as diverse in its meaning

- opinionated: There is exactly one way of doing it right and either you like it or you don't, but it might come with an extensive feature set compared to minimal.

- spatial: no idea; Endless space? 3D? Depending on my geolocation?!?

- comprehensive: 'Oh, I have to learn something, but not too much'

Modern, on the other hand, means to me: Mainstream look & feel (kinda polished) and with considerable feature set.

Whats your definition?

Re: Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

#150
I tried tiling WM: i3/i3gap for a year, then sway and bspwm for a few days but finally went back to Gnome.

I got fed-up spending way too much tweaking the UI to my "needs". (To be fair, most of the time was spent on the toolbar (polybar, i3bar) configuration). I also realized that I mostly needed tiling for the terminal.

Thus I embraced Gnome UI with a few extensions: unite, dash-to-dock, system-monitor, etc. and started using tmux for the terminal.

I might try Material Shell but I am actually happy with today's Gnome3. Performance is decent, and the level of configuration is enough for me with a few extensions. It is not as stable and polished as MacOSX but there is no blocking point.

N.B: I kept i3 for my work Linux VM due to very limited system resources.

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