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Material Shell – A modern desktop interface for GNOME

GekkePrutser 6y ago
Nice!!! This is the kind of thing I visit Hacker News for. I wonder how this compares with the Gnome tiling Add-on from Pop!_OS that is becoming very popular. But this material shell sounds like a much more holistic approach than just adding tiling to Gnome. I'll definitely try this out.
- lb0 6y ago
  Sold when I read tiling, yay.. maybe finally at some point I get rid of xmonad, which I loved to play with but do not understand anymore (nothing to complain, has been stable for years even across Ubuntu versions .. but also never touched the config in like 5+ years :D)
- square_usual 6y ago
  Pop's tiling is great, and it doesn't force tiling like this does so you can turn it off if you don't want it. I mostly just use their keyboard navigation tools to snap, resize and move instead of the tiling functionality, though. I think I'll stick with Pop's, partly because I'm used to its keyboard navigation, and partly because I don't particularly like tiling.
- mcny 6y ago
  I have not looked into these things too much but I like how gnome keyring unlocks when I login to my fedora machine. After a simple initial setup, all my git commits are automatically signed by my gpg key. I don't even have to think about it. I haven't used this for anything serious but I think alternatives will need to achieve feature parity before I can seriously consider them. Kind of like how I go back to x as opposed to wayland because obs can't capture screen (last time I checked).
  - vladvasiliu 6y ago
    This is a Gnome Shell extension, so all the session-related stuff you describe should have no idea or even care that it's running. I actually don't even use gnome or the gnome session, just bare i3 with lightdm and the gnome keyring unlocks automatically.
  - gtf21 6y ago
    You don't need to be using the full GNOME DE in order to use gnome-keyring and have it unlock [1]. [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNOME/Keyring#Using_the_keyring_outside_GNOME https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNOME/Keyring#Using_the...
dddw 6y ago
wow that looks pretty darn great... installing on Fedora silverblue right now.
pmlnr 6y ago
Don't worry, the next gtk3 update will break it. /s
cheph 6y ago
With how horrible Gnome 3 is to use I guess nothing can be worse, though I'm sure just like gnome 3 it will also randomly crash every 15 minutes.
- pmontra 6y ago
  Anecdotally (1.5 years of usage) Gnome 3 doesn't crash.
  - mcny 6y ago
    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 connect gnome to any online account if $special_conditions" feels like a gotcha. Does anyone even use gnome online services?
    - vladvasiliu 6y ago
      I've had it connected to Business Google Drive subscription with a ton (>1TB) of data on it. Never had any problems. Didn't ask it to sync locally though. Don't know which exact version it was, but I was using Ubuntu 20.04 at the time.
    - pmontra 6y ago
      I for sure don't connect it to anything. Nice to know it's calling for troubles to do it. Thanks.
    - SSLy 6y ago
      >Does anyone even use gnome online services? I do have two google accounts and one MS enabled in GOA.
    - deforciant 6y ago
      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.
square_usual 6y ago
Why does this website need javascript to load? Everything in there could fit on a static page with gifs.
- chabad360 6y ago
  The issue of the gifs was actually discussed on discord. IIRC it was because the gifs would be to big in some cases.
  - marksbrown 6y ago
    That's a poor excuse given that a) mp4 support is pretty good these days and b) CSS already has responsive loading of assets. It's purely that to a man with a JS framework everything looks like a dynamic site. I highly recommend running Noscript to see how much of the Internet is broken because of this kind of nonsense.
    - tssva 6y ago
      Running Noscript doesn't show you how much of the internet is broken but instead is you purposefully breaking the internet for yourself.
      - square_usual 6y ago
        You don't need Javascript for static content.
        tssva 6y ago
        And dynamic content isn't broken content. Choosing to only view static content is a personal preference.
      - SquareWheel 6y ago
        Agreed. Web standards exist between the server and client. If you break the standard (eg. by disabling JS), then it's your responsibility when things stop working. It's great that you have the freedom to do so, but you have no right to claim the website is "broken" as a result.
monkin 6y ago
Sadly it’s a material design, one of the worst design frameworks out there. And, it is used contrary to its purpose on all possible levels without any understanding of it.
- scott31 6y ago
  > Sadly it’s a material design, one of the worst shits out there. Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - monkin 6y ago
    Yeah... No. There’s no point repeating the same information about it.
  - rswail 6y ago
    Agreed. I think Material as a design is flawed because the affordances to discover features are limited. It's OK for phones with small screens, but Material on a website on a desktop puts everything inside a hamburger or a gear.
  - rvz 6y ago
    But actually it's true. Before, It was once great on Android but now it has been abused on the Web, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Linux desktop apps, etc. It is the new Bootstrap, but inconsistent and worse every where else apart from its use in Android apps.
christophilus 6y ago
This looks decent. Tangentially, why do Gnome windows have such big title bars? Is that something you can adjust?
- p_l 6y ago
  It's because a) GNOME no longer renders title bars b) GTK3 instead treats title bar as combined titlebar + menu space
  - turbinerneiter 6y ago
    People look at the big title-bar, complain, and don't see the lack of a menu-bar. I really love it.
  - barrkel 6y ago
    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.
    - alex_duf 6y ago
      Why is it a horror show? It never bothered me
      - petepete 6y ago
        It's not, some people are just a little dramatic about it.
        II2II 6y ago
        I wouldn't go as far as calling it a horror show, but do find it genuinely unpleasant to use. In a default configuration GNOME's task switcher seems to assume that there is only one window open for each application. Switching between multiple windows in the same application is rather inconvenient. The title bar stuffs in frequently accessed options then hides the menu bar under the hamburger icon. Those frequently used options are the ones I am least likely to access from the title bar since they are bound to hotkeys that are common to most programs. For anyone who is accustomed to other metaphors, I'm not terribly surprised by the description horror show. Even as someone who is willing to adapt to change, many of the changes seem to be contrary to usability or efficiency.
dusted 6y ago
I think I'll just stick to i3 for now.
- bradwood 6y ago
  This. All day long.
- rtlfe 6y ago
  It's moderately intimidating to jump into i3 or xmonad if you haven't used them before. This looks like a friendlier way for more people to get exposed to tiling, but doesn't seem to offer anything compelling for people already comfortable with one of the others.
axilmar 6y ago
I don't like this at all. Scrolling is a 'no' in serious UI design, and tiling should be an option. The video is too fast to allow any actual evaluation of its offerings. The big buttons in the section 'find your tasks instantaneously' are not necessary. The gnome interface sucks big time and I don't see this as improvement.
- fock 6y ago
  somehow every app-selector I know (except a real terminal shell) uses scrolling. Imho this looks great for a tablet (and if this stabilizes I'd in fact buy a surface pro or similar instead of a new notebook, should my current private notebook die).
- jsiepkes 6y ago
  > Scrolling is a 'no' in serious UI design Scrolling gives users a spatial feeling (ie. "what is where in relation to something else") in contrast to just magically letting things appear without animation or transition. There are plenty of UI designs which use scrolling. Sure you can debate whether they are a success or not but I've never head of "Scrolling is a 'no' in serious UI design". That sounds more like a personal preference. > and tiling should be an option. As far as I can tell there is nothing stopping you from simply using a workspace per app. Effectively disabling tiling.
  - d3nj4l 6y ago
    You can't put windows on top of each other that way.
  - dkersten 6y ago
    This has a stacking option too. You don’t have to use tiling.
  - axilmar 6y ago
    > Scrolling gives users a spatial feeling The spatial feeling is necessary only if things take more space than needed. In this case, this is not valid. There are no things that take more space than needed. It's simply a distraction. > As far as I can tell there is nothing stopping you from simply using a workspace per app. Effectively disabling tiling. What if I want windows to be connected? that feature is not offered.
rvz 6y ago
> Designed to simplify navigation and reduce the need to manipulate windows in order to improve productivity. It's meant to be 100% predictable and bring the benefits of tools coveted by professionals to everyone. Oh dear. Now I remember why I keep using macOS which actually does it better than 'this'.
bestouff 6y ago
Looks nice, is there a video of how it works with multi-monitor setups ?
matt_f 6y ago
Love this. <3
5h 6y ago
I've lived in Awesome WM for years, this looks pretty good to me!
- Elv13 6y ago
  You can have both! https://github.com/material-shell/material-awesome https://github.com/material-shell/material-awesome This was an earlier version of Material Shell based on AwesomeWM. At some point the author wanted more animations and custom menu handling. Those are 2 areas AwesomeWM doesn't really handle well.
generalk 6y ago
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.
- phkahler 6y ago
  Thanks for pointing out that it supports floating windows. I use a 55" 4k monitor so I manually lay out my app windows and would hate tiling (only rarely used stuff goes up top and I drag those down when needed). I use and like gnome but there are a few thing I hate about it so I'll give this a try.
  - ycombinete 6y ago
    how far away from the screen do you sit?
    - 6y ago
aszen 6y ago
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/ https://regolith-linux.org/
- mxuribe 6y ago
  I'm going through a distro hopping phase, so recently hopped to Fedora spins (am currently on KDE)...but had heard of regolith separately and really liked the idea. So i went to DistroTest[0] and took it for a spin, and it won me over. I still ant to finish my experiment with fedora spins, but right after, I'll be heading Regolith! [0] https://distrotest.net/Regolith%20Linux/R1.1 https://distrotest.net/Regolith%20Linux/R1.1
- gavinray 6y ago
  I Ctrl+F'ed in this thread for Regolith, this should be higher. Zero setup, incredible keybindings. You can install it on top of your existing Distro, as an apt package. And then log out + log back in using new DE. I had never used a tiling WM before Regolith, i3 seemed too difficult to configure for someone who didn't truly didn't understand the point/benefit of using tiling WM's. A day into using Regolith on Ubuntu I was hooked. Been using it for years now and it's the best decision I've ever made, productivity skyrocketed and it looks nice. I tried Pop_OS shell's tiling WM, as I was hopeful, but the keybindings and behavior aren't as nice as Regolith. It does a "swap" animation when changing tile positioning that slows stuff down, and I could never get the gap borders to disappear completely.
- barnabee 6y ago
  Agree! Can't speak highly enough of Regolith. I'd actually somewhat given up trying to keep i3 working nicely and reverted to XFCE (which is at least far less obnoxious then Gnome 3) until I discovered Regolith and have been using it happily ever since.
squarefoot 6y ago
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?
yrro 6y ago
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 as my regular user), that quick terminal session I opened to work on a script, the SSH connection to an OpenStack director, the 'oc rsh' command that I'm using to administrate a PostgreSQL database running in OpenShift, and so on. This becomes far worse when using multiple monitors. Say I have teams hanging around on my secondary monitor to keep an eye on stuff. I literally just now alt-tabbed into a terminal and then alt-tabbed back to continue writing this comment. As a result, I'm back in Firefox on my primary monitor (as expected) but now I have an unwanted random Firefox window that I forgot was even open on top of Teams on my secondary monitor! The only window manager I've ever been at home with while using multiple applications, workspaces and monitors has been i3. Specifically I love how it manages multiple monitors in that each has a current workspace, but workspaces are not bound to a particular monitor. So I was able to have my secondary monitor always showing my 'Slack and email' workspace, and switch between my multiple task-based workspaces on my primary monitor and never get confused like I with GNOME where I want to switch to my email tab but to get there I have to remember ahead of time that I have to switch to my first workspace, then switch applications to Firefox, then switch windows to the one with Outlook in it, and finally switch to the Outlook tab... Anyway. This project looks awesome and I will try it out!
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  You can kind of implement this in Gnome 3 by putting windows that go together on a workspace, the same way you do in i3. Hoewever, using workspaces in Gnome never felt as fluid as it does in i3.
- dkersten 6y ago
  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 guess since they’re not Wayland aware they can’t bypass the compositor?) So, I too will try this project out as it looks like it may be a nice middleground where I can be productive in gnome on X.
scoutt 6y ago
Can two windows overlap? Or are they just opened full-screen or inside a tile side-by-side? If not, then I don't like that very much. For example the calculator: I don't want it to take 1/3 or 1/4 of the screen. It's like going back into a 35 years ago pre DESQview era. Edit: nevermind. "In Material Shell windows are tiled. These means they are organised in a predictable way in which they do not overlap". I guess I like my windows to be not predictable, whatever that means.
- approxim8ion 6y ago
  I can't speak about Material Shell, but on dedicated tiling WMs, you get to select a subset of apps that you want to always open in floating mode to accommodate the use case you are describing. Nonetheless, I find myself not using that at all, since in most cases the tiled view allows for optimum use of screen real-estate in my opinion. If I can't see the entirety of a window it's kind of useless to me, so i'd prefer it be on a different workspace. But of course, floating one window like your calculator while your browser and RSS feed reader are tiled on the desktop is entirely possible and probably quite common. I do, however, use a popup rofi window with a custom script as a calculator, so that does indeed float near the top of my screen.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  In i3 you can perform operations based on window criteria for example if calculator don't tile with for_window. KDE has window rules, Linux in general has devilspie2. If it doesn't have this feature it probably should.
bluewavescrash 6y ago
Cool website.
dave_sullivan 6y ago
As an i3-gaps user... I would try this.
- nobleach 6y ago
  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.
  - Galanwe 6y ago
    I did start using i3 with Xephyr (Xnest at the time) inside gnome. That could be something you want to try. It basically allows you to have a X11 window running i3 inside your usual gnome session. While in full-screen, that gave me a gnome workspace that was effectively i3.
  - jeromenerf 6y ago
    You can run "gnome-flashback" somehow below i3 using https://github.com/i3-gnome/i3-gnome https://github.com/i3-gnome/i3-gnome This is nothing too complicated, just a session with the right components selected to provide whatever services you need: display management, screen locking, WiFi, etc.
kevinherron 6y ago
One thing I've learned from using i3wm and trying various other tiling shells/scripts over time is a stacking mode is crucial to my workflow. It doesn't look like this has one. There's an outstanding PR to add stacking to Pop Shell [0] that I'm hopeful about. [0] https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell
heresie-dabord 6y ago
> "Improve your user experience and get rid of the anarchy of traditional desktop workflows." This usage of "anarchy" makes me wonder what is so satisfying to advocates of "tiling". I personally don't have a need for new windows to conform to a strict placement algorithm. My usability requirement for new windows: a) open the window in a timely manner and make it distinct so I can identify it; b) don't fiddle with my visual field unnecessarily. I use OpenBox. I make the "active" window distinct using a custom theme. I open what I need and hide the rest in a shaded window and/or virtual desktop until I need it. I find what I need in the menus. (I won't debate the qualities of Gnome, but I prefer a lighter DE.)
nsonha 6y ago
when is this material crap gonna die? There are gaps everywhere who wants more gaps in their DE?
- jeromenerf 6y ago
  I do. I don’t need them when every pixel counts but I think they are useful If not pleasing in many cases. That’s why I created what I believe was the first tiling wm "useless gaps" patch for dwm 10 years ago. Since then, it has been adopted by other wm, i3 being a notable exception. I don’t use a DE, but I guess a little space between those fat bars and backdrop’d windows might help to see through the bloat.
  - nsonha 6y ago
    I was referring more to the excessive padding in material design in general, but yeah I'm not a fan of gaps so pairing that with gaps in tilling seems extra bloated to me.
    - jeromenerf 6y ago
      Oh yes, I see what you mean. I have yet to see an enjoyable material design app. With the same underlying motivations, I have better appreciation of Apple iOS interface guidelines.
mkaymalright 6y ago
I like it! There is just one thing I'm missing from Gnome which is the white dot on top of the time signifying there is an unread notification. With Material Shell I have to manually click the time to see if I have any unread emails or slack messages.
wayneftw 6y ago
Can the user merge the workspace panel into the the system panel and move all that to the bottom of the screen instead? I honestly can't stand global top bars and "system panels" that are nothing more than always-visible launcher menus. They're just a waste of space. IMO Chrome looks ridiculous in the video, with a set of tabs directly underneath the workspace panel tabs. What I'd really like to see is XFCE with automatic tiling. I can probably script a half-assed version of it myself without too much trouble, but it would be nice to have a full-assed version of that.
- armoredkitten 6y ago
  A few months ago I set up i3 to work within Xfce (essentially swapping out xfwm4 as the window manager), and I love it. It took a bit of tinkering to get the two to play nicely, as you might expect, but once I got it set up properly it was great. I wanted to use a tiling WM, but I had a setup I really liked with Xfce and didn't want to give up all the DE niceties with my panels, system tray, etc. This gives me the best of both worlds as far as I'm concerned. That said, I agree with you that it would be nice to have a built-in option to switch between tiling and floating. I've seen that Pop_OS has this, but that's also using Gnome.
sanqui 6y ago
This is so close to how I would want my shell to work! For instance, there is a floating mode which can be enabled per-workspace. Big fan of the persistency. I have a few nitpicks, but the author seems active on Discord and work is ongoing. Going to give this an extended ride for sure. EDIT: For Fedora users, apparently the package is quite outdated and missing some features and fixes. The author is going to make a new release on GitHub and hopefully package maintainers will make an update.
dubcanada 6y ago
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?
- nobleach 6y ago
  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 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.
- riquito 6y ago
  What's the exact issue? If you assign a bunch of workspaces (say 6,7,8,9) to the secondary monitor when it appears your flow shouldn't really change
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  The way multiple monitors work out of the box is that a workspace is created when you first switch to it on the monitor that is focused. This means that even if you always use foo on monitor bar you must switch to monitor bar before hitting the hotkey to switch to foo. If all you know is focus directional hotkeys you could trivially have to hit focus left 7 times to get to the left monitor for example before hitting super+3 to switch to 3. This is of course horrible. Your life would be simplified if you had a hotkey to focus output right and focus output left. This makes it not TOO laborious however your life would be simplified MUCH MUCH more if you used the assign directive to assign particular workspaces to particular monitors for example 1-5 on left monitor and 6-0 on right. You would accomplish this for example by using workspace 1 output name workspace 2 output name ... Then if you watch to switch to 3 on left monitor you don't have to worry about where you are presently you can simply hit super+3 wherever you are.
- Galanwe 6y ago
  Been using i3 daily with 3 monitors and no problem (2 external screens + laptop) for 10 years now. What is your problem exactly? I usually reserve [0] for the laptop, [1], [2], [3] and [4] for my left monitor, and [5] on my right monitor.
_def 6y ago
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)
- chronogram 6y ago
  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.
  - justwalt 6y ago
    I use it as well, it shouldn’t be too hard to find by searching “top panel scroll” on the extensions site or something along those lines.
  - _def 6y ago
    https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/701/top-panel-workspace-scroll/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/701/top-panel-workspa...
tkainrad 6y ago
I don't see why you would need such a complex system (spatial model) to switch between your apps. In my opinion, this has been solved perfectly many years ago. I simply use Super+<num> to launch/switch to my 10 most important applications. Supported out-of-the box by both Windows and Gnome and 100% predictable. Every shortcut invocation will launch exactly the right application.
- nsonha 6y ago
  I find that wierd too, and example of nerds cooking up something no one needs but then it catched on because nerdy things are hip now.
- WealthVsSurvive 6y ago
  (i3-gaps user) Tiling is basically an extension of this, and it can absolutely make your life easier if your work or play revolves around switching between workspaces that contain ~3+ windows each.
robertlagrant 6y ago
How is the tiling with multiple monitors?
yboris 6y ago
Reminds me of the 10/GUI ("contenuum") http://10gui.com/ http://10gui.com/ A user interface mockup where everything is grouped, spatially oriented, and scrollable. https://vimeo.com/6712657 https://vimeo.com/6712657
- erickj 6y ago
  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
- dflock 6y ago
  PaperWM is inspired by/implements parts of this: https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM/ https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM/
t0astbread 6y ago
Nice! I use i3 but I've always thought it would be great if it supported manipulating windows with the mouse as well. I don't use GNOME so this isn't for me but I like the idea.
- Galanwe 6y ago
  You can have floating windows with i3. Try meta-shift-space, you will get a floating window that can be dragged and resized with the mouse.
  - t0astbread 6y ago
    I know about that and it's a handy feature but I meant the typical window operations (moving in the tile grid, resizing of grid rows/columns possibly also sending to other workspaces or the scratchpad and toggling floating or fullscreen mode via a context menu on the title bar)
michaelmrose 6y ago
How does this handle multiple monitors? Isn't the default on gnome 3 still to only switch the primary monitor when switching workspaces?
- kevincox 6y ago
  It doesn't appear to work well with multiple monitors. I could open apps on different monitors but not move them between. The native GNOME shortcuts just caused the windows to flicker and their shortcuts don't have anything to do with monitors.
  - michaelmrose 6y ago
    https://github.com/material-shell/material-shell/issues/269 https://github.com/material-shell/material-shell/issues/269 >We are currently only compatible with the one workspace per external monitor mode since it's was the most adapted to my vision of the ideal workflow and also because altering the behavior of GNOME Shell can be a bit complex and maintain multiple mode can be very time consuming. Therefore step after step our code base is becoming more mature and I may be incline to work a second option if there enough demands. But we also have other fundamental stone to build like window resizing. Seems like figuring how it works across multiple monitors would be a rather basic building block but dev has different priorities it seems.
d2161 6y ago
So it's not a shell but a theme?
mikewhy 6y ago
I've always wanted to try a tiling window system, but they just don't seem to gel with how I work at all. Rarely, if ever, do I want a window to take up some common percentage of the screen. My editor is ~100 columns, which will change depending on the font / font size. My terminal is all over the place. My browser is multiple widths, because I need to test responsiveness, or what fits in my current tab does not fit what's in my next tab. Is there any sort of middle ground tiling solution for people like me?
- redisman 6y ago
  In Pop OS the windows can have two states. Stickied to a part of the screen with auto-tiling with other stickied windows or free floating. I would guess many Linux flavors can do something like that. To me the ideal solution was Spectacle for MacOS - key shortcuts for a window to take up the space of a predetermined space. I just don't think automatic tiling makes all that much sense unless you're building some kind of a dashboard. Tiling web browsers is especially bad since I use a lot of websites that flip to mobile mode or are just plain unusable when tiled into the wrong shape.
  - narwally 6y ago
    For certain websites forcing them into their mobile version can be pretty useful, but it takes a bit of playing around to make everything work nicely together. I have a group of browser windows and a layout defined in stumpwm that includes gmail, spotify, and a few other sites that have good responsive design.
- narwally 6y ago
  Take a look at dynamic window managers. They allow for switching between tiling and floating windows.
- gkop 6y ago
  Linux: just use Gnome out of the box, the basic tiling is totally usable. It's extremely simplistic, but helpful enough to get you hyped on tiling. macOS: try Magnet app, it’s fantastic. Great out of the box config, fairly powerful (caveat: the mouse targets stink; but who uses the mouse anyway?)
felixfoertsch 6y ago
I really wish people would stop using "beautiful" as if it were an objective adjective.
- ziftface 6y ago
  I interpret that as meaning that good looks was one of their design goals. It doesn't necessarily mean everyone will find it pretty.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Ditto "fast".
  - Narishma 6y ago
    Unless it's accompanied by benchmarks; then it's fine.
lubonay 6y ago
Am I the only one who thinks it's weird that there are no tests in the repo?
pimlottc 6y ago
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...
- slingnow 6y ago
  I would argue all of you suggested words are just as overused and meaningless as "modern". At the end of the day, I would still need to see the product to understand what it does.
  - pimlottc 6y ago
    It's hard to describe a complex program with one word but I would argue they are at least more informative than "modern". Unless you're intentionally using old technology or going for a "retro-style", pretty much anything written in 2020 could be described as "modern". The alternatives listed as just examples, I would need to understand the program better to come up with a truly apt adjective.
  - eejjjj82 6y ago
    without trying to nitpick I had a similar reaction as pimlottc. the Gnome-Shell title page is: "GNOME Shell, next generation desktop shell" so when I read modern on your description I just chuckled a bit. in any case great work on this. looks like a ton of work
- arendtio 6y ago
  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?
gigatexal 6y ago
meh, imo, regolith is peak desktop for linux right now. [1] [1] https://regolith-linux.org/download/ https://regolith-linux.org/download/
V6HBGNQHU 6y ago
Pop Shell from System76 also does something similar. That is a gnome shell extension that provides tiling window management. It's focus is keyboard driven window navigation and has the option to switch between tiling and floating mode. https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell
- mark_l_watson 6y ago
  I was going to mention the same thing. I liked the old Pop Shell and have now been experimenting with the new tiling interface. Off topic, but System76 really seems like a great company. I enjoy my Linux laptop and their software support is good. I am stuck on Apple's platform for the Apple Watch and iPhone (and I like iPads), but I wonder if I would ever buy another Mac laptop. Turnkey Linux systems, like those of System76, Dell, etc. really make using Linux low overhead.
dzonga 6y ago
looks okay, tried it and bang! everything is in disarray. I found organising windows to be a pain. suddenly everything is in full screen mode. I thought the search would've been like the search provided by kde, i.e search through open windows no matter what app. that's one thing I miss about kde. and wish I could get in gnome.
miguelmota 6y ago
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.
asciimov 6y ago
Thinking about those default keybindings (super+<w,a,s,d>) make my wrists hurt. Since the typical keyboard only has super (win) on the left, they should've used super+ <i,j,k,l> or <h,j,k,l>.
bengalister 6y ago
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.
- gkop 6y ago
  Beg to differ that macOS is more stable and polished. macOS makes “arbitrary” UI changes over the major versions, including what I experience as regressions, while Gnome 3 keeps what works. And I experience more UI latency with macOS and a less-polished out of the box experience: Eg, macOS has no built-in tiling. Eg, macOS prohibits using the keyboard to interact with system modals unless you change settings. Eg, macOS hotkey for spotlight requires holding down a modifier key. Eg, macOS spotlight autocomplete is unbelievably brittle/dumb. Eg, macOS doesn’t allow changing the system font size, you must scale the whole viewport. (Can you tell I am required to use macOS at work? /facepalm)
y2kenny 6y ago
For folks who are looking for tiling without switching the windows manager, the gTile [0] GNOME shell extension is pretty good. [0]: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/28/gtile/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/28/gtile/
- gkop 6y ago
  Gnome has [very] basic tiling built in.
Angeo34 6y ago
People jump at the words minimal and modern but "Private secure and fast" is never questioned makes sense.
forbiddenvoid 6y ago
Installed and activated this morning. I'm already a fan. Easily revertible if I decide later that I hate it, but I like this workspace strategy much better than what's built-in with gnome. I did find it a bit challenging to figure out where the settings were located (I don't use many GNOME extensions).
forbiddenvoid 6y ago
Installed and activated this morning. I'm already a fan. Easily revertible if I decide later that I hate it, but I like this workspace strategy much better than what's built-in with gnome. I did find it a bit challenging to figure out where the settings were located (I don't use many GNOME extensions), but once I figured out the settings are on the extensions.gnome.org page for the extension it was lot easier.
anotheryou 6y ago
I want 2/3rd 1/3rd tiling
mmcnl 6y ago
There's much to love about Linux but the desktop experience is terrible. Windows and macOS are lightyears ahead.
fareesh 6y ago
I find everything other than KDE and lighter desktops really slow - even with good hardware
eximius 6y ago
I can't recommend AwesomeWM enough. You don't really have to customize it at all for the workspaces + basic tiling to be incredibly useful. And the workspaces can be per monitor!!! Or you can tie them together! Or use them as tags instead of workspaces! It's really just so good. I think the only thing I really added was audio key support and I changed the menu shortcut...? I'm not actually sure what the argument is to not use it. (it supports floating windows, if you want that as the default)
- mqus 6y ago
  > I'm not actually sure what the argument is to not use it. I'm currently using it, but if I switch away, it will be because there is no wayland support yet.
  - eximius 6y ago
    Heh, valid point.
    - Elv13 6y ago
      Patches welcome :P But really, someone went quite far a couple year ago. Unfortunately he lost interest before the finish line. There is no such thing as a WM port from X11 to wayland. It's a full backend rewrite. The design that would have worked (after like 4 rewrite), but wasn't completed, was to have a WLroot process, then some custom protocols to talk to an awesome "client". This was a fork of the old codebase with the X11 code stripped out and the implementation of those little private protocols between the wlroot "server" and awesome "client". Using this model, the event loops lived in different process and AwesomeWM could restart without losing all applications. It did render stuff, including the wibar and clients (without titlebars). But that's about it. It never got to the point you could dog-food it.
satya71 6y ago
Looks nice and innovative. But GNOME already lost me as a user. Wish they'd make it independent of GNOME.
nomdep 6y ago
These "Workspaces" are called "Activities" in KDE (avaible since KDE 4 I think). I use them daily
einpoklum 6y ago
> for GNOME For the life of me, I can't understand why there are that many GNOME-based desktop environments. I personally dislike most of their approach to UI. Maybe the innards are very pleasant to work with, but it's GTK-based, isn't it? That a somewhat-dated C toolkit, even if it has bindings in other languages. So I kind of doubt that. And yet - MATE, Cinnamon, XFCE (ok, that's just GTK, not GNOME proper), Unity. This is not a rant, I'm actually curious why GNOME is that popular, and those projects did not choose some other basis. I mean, that should be possible, right? LXDE switched from GTK to Qt a few years back.
- msb 6y ago
  I will tell you why I use Gnome. Gnome/Fedora was the first distro that played nice with my 4k XPS display AND the various 2k and HD secondary displays I use. I switched from Ubuntu/XFCE about five years ago. As I get older, I look for applications and DE's that require as little mouse use as possible. In Gnome 3, it's super+space, type application name, enter and use. Super+arrow to snap around the screen. A minuscule top bar gives me the perfect amount of screen real estate. The only application that I like to tile is a terminal and tmux works just fine. So for my use, Gnome just seems to stay out of my way.
mrlonglong 6y ago
Somehow the title reminds me of Madonna's song Material Girl.
trilinearnz 6y ago
Looks really nice. I like how creative the Linux community is with their GUI experimentation. My favourite feature is the ability to tile windows with a little gap between them. Having visibility (even a little) into the wallpaper when you're doing work makes a big difference for me. It's like it grounds you in a more natural frame of reference. I'm sure Mac users can relate to this due to the late introduction of true window maximisation, but as a Windows user I'm coming to appreciate the "non-fullscreen" or "edge-to-edge tiled" working environment.
corytheboyd 6y ago
Please. Add. SCREENSHOTS! You lost me at having to watch a video. Just lead with a screenshot. A video is fine as supplemental marketing, but you NEED a screenshot otherwise you’re losing those first impression opportunities.
aabbcc1241 6y ago
I used to switch between gnome and cinnamon. I switched between them when one failed after update. They seldom fail simultaneously, but once that happened, I switched to awesome and never go back.
RMPR 6y ago
I really like the idea, maybe this can make me back to GNOME, but it seems to me it lacks an absolutely vital feature of i3/Sway: the scratchpad[0], I always have an Emacs buffer opened to my org folder, and the scratchpad is very handy. 0: https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_scratchpad https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_scratchpad
linuxdaemon 6y ago
I have tried to like tiling window managers and for whatever reason, it just hasn't clicked for me. I have really come to like the way default Gnome works. That said, I have used material-shell for about 1/2 an hour, and so far this is the first time I can see myself actually liking a tiling window manager. At the risk of being the guy who has used it for a minimal amount of time and starts complaining about it because it doesn't work like I'm used to...There are a couple preference things for me that I wish were a little different. I like gnome's no-frills fullscreen. You only have the app and the top panel stuff. In material-shell, I can SUPER+ESC to get full screen, but I think I want to be able to just mouse-over to the left side to bring up the panel while in full screen. To get to anything at the panel I have to SUPER-ESC first. Which is ok, I'd just rather it optionally auto-hide. Kind of the same as the left-panel, the top-panel workspace list looks especially jumbled when you have an app like a browser maximized. So you see the workspace list, then your titlebar, then your browser tabs. It just adds extra "business" that I would prefer to not see. And again, enabling fullscreen with SUPER+ESC basically gets me what I want so it's not that big of a deal. Finally, I understand why people would like it, but for me I would prefer to not have the "+" in the workspace switcher at all. Or at least minimally have it skip being part of my SUPER+A/SUPER+D switching. I REALLY don't like it showing up when nothing is open on my workspace or when I have a vertical split workspace, and only one thing on the screen and it shows the "+" content window. I am so accustomed to just hitting SUPER and then typing the app that I want, its way faster to do that and I'd rather the whole "+" window go away. All-in-all, I'm pretty satisfied with material-shell and will definitely be using it as my desktop.

Nice!!! This is the kind of thing I visit Hacker News for. I wonder how this compares with the Gnome tiling Add-on from Pop!_OS that is becoming very popular. But this material shell sounds like a much more holistic approach than just adding tiling to Gnome. I'll definitely try this out.

lb0 6y ago
Sold when I read tiling, yay.. maybe finally at some point I get rid of xmonad, which I loved to play with but do not understand anymore (nothing to complain, has been stable for years even across Ubuntu versions .. but also never touched the config in like 5+ years :D)
square_usual 6y ago
Pop's tiling is great, and it doesn't force tiling like this does so you can turn it off if you don't want it. I mostly just use their keyboard navigation tools to snap, resize and move instead of the tiling functionality, though. I think I'll stick with Pop's, partly because I'm used to its keyboard navigation, and partly because I don't particularly like tiling.
mcny 6y ago
I have not looked into these things too much but I like how gnome keyring unlocks when I login to my fedora machine. After a simple initial setup, all my git commits are automatically signed by my gpg key. I don't even have to think about it. I haven't used this for anything serious but I think alternatives will need to achieve feature parity before I can seriously consider them. Kind of like how I go back to x as opposed to wayland because obs can't capture screen (last time I checked).
- vladvasiliu 6y ago
  This is a Gnome Shell extension, so all the session-related stuff you describe should have no idea or even care that it's running. I actually don't even use gnome or the gnome session, just bare i3 with lightdm and the gnome keyring unlocks automatically.
- gtf21 6y ago
  You don't need to be using the full GNOME DE in order to use gnome-keyring and have it unlock [1]. [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNOME/Keyring#Using_the_keyring_outside_GNOME https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GNOME/Keyring#Using_the...

dddw 6y ago

wow that looks pretty darn great... installing on Fedora silverblue right now.

pmlnr 6y ago

Don't worry, the next gtk3 update will break it. /s

cheph 6y ago

With how horrible Gnome 3 is to use I guess nothing can be worse, though I'm sure just like gnome 3 it will also randomly crash every 15 minutes.

pmontra 6y ago
Anecdotally (1.5 years of usage) Gnome 3 doesn't crash.
- mcny 6y ago
  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 connect gnome to any online account if $special_conditions" feels like a gotcha. Does anyone even use gnome online services?
  - vladvasiliu 6y ago
    I've had it connected to Business Google Drive subscription with a ton (>1TB) of data on it. Never had any problems. Didn't ask it to sync locally though. Don't know which exact version it was, but I was using Ubuntu 20.04 at the time.
  - pmontra 6y ago
    I for sure don't connect it to anything. Nice to know it's calling for troubles to do it. Thanks.
  - SSLy 6y ago
    >Does anyone even use gnome online services? I do have two google accounts and one MS enabled in GOA.
  - deforciant 6y ago
    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.

square_usual 6y ago

Why does this website need javascript to load? Everything in there could fit on a static page with gifs.

chabad360 6y ago
The issue of the gifs was actually discussed on discord. IIRC it was because the gifs would be to big in some cases.
- marksbrown 6y ago
  That's a poor excuse given that a) mp4 support is pretty good these days and b) CSS already has responsive loading of assets. It's purely that to a man with a JS framework everything looks like a dynamic site. I highly recommend running Noscript to see how much of the Internet is broken because of this kind of nonsense.
  - tssva 6y ago
    Running Noscript doesn't show you how much of the internet is broken but instead is you purposefully breaking the internet for yourself.
    - square_usual 6y ago
      You don't need Javascript for static content.
      - tssva 6y ago
        And dynamic content isn't broken content. Choosing to only view static content is a personal preference.
    - SquareWheel 6y ago
      Agreed. Web standards exist between the server and client. If you break the standard (eg. by disabling JS), then it's your responsibility when things stop working. It's great that you have the freedom to do so, but you have no right to claim the website is "broken" as a result.

monkin 6y ago

Sadly it’s a material design, one of the worst design frameworks out there. And, it is used contrary to its purpose on all possible levels without any understanding of it.

scott31 6y ago
> Sadly it’s a material design, one of the worst shits out there. Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- monkin 6y ago
  Yeah... No. There’s no point repeating the same information about it.
- rswail 6y ago
  Agreed. I think Material as a design is flawed because the affordances to discover features are limited. It's OK for phones with small screens, but Material on a website on a desktop puts everything inside a hamburger or a gear.
- rvz 6y ago
  But actually it's true. Before, It was once great on Android but now it has been abused on the Web, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Linux desktop apps, etc. It is the new Bootstrap, but inconsistent and worse every where else apart from its use in Android apps.

christophilus 6y ago

This looks decent. Tangentially, why do Gnome windows have such big title bars? Is that something you can adjust?

p_l 6y ago
It's because a) GNOME no longer renders title bars b) GTK3 instead treats title bar as combined titlebar + menu space
- turbinerneiter 6y ago
  People look at the big title-bar, complain, and don't see the lack of a menu-bar. I really love it.
- barrkel 6y ago
  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.
  - alex_duf 6y ago
    Why is it a horror show? It never bothered me
    - petepete 6y ago
      It's not, some people are just a little dramatic about it.
      - II2II 6y ago
        I wouldn't go as far as calling it a horror show, but do find it genuinely unpleasant to use. In a default configuration GNOME's task switcher seems to assume that there is only one window open for each application. Switching between multiple windows in the same application is rather inconvenient. The title bar stuffs in frequently accessed options then hides the menu bar under the hamburger icon. Those frequently used options are the ones I am least likely to access from the title bar since they are bound to hotkeys that are common to most programs. For anyone who is accustomed to other metaphors, I'm not terribly surprised by the description horror show. Even as someone who is willing to adapt to change, many of the changes seem to be contrary to usability or efficiency.

dusted 6y ago

I think I'll just stick to i3 for now.

bradwood 6y ago
This. All day long.
rtlfe 6y ago
It's moderately intimidating to jump into i3 or xmonad if you haven't used them before. This looks like a friendlier way for more people to get exposed to tiling, but doesn't seem to offer anything compelling for people already comfortable with one of the others.

axilmar 6y ago

I don't like this at all. Scrolling is a 'no' in serious UI design, and tiling should be an option. The video is too fast to allow any actual evaluation of its offerings. The big buttons in the section 'find your tasks instantaneously' are not necessary. The gnome interface sucks big time and I don't see this as improvement.

fock 6y ago
somehow every app-selector I know (except a real terminal shell) uses scrolling. Imho this looks great for a tablet (and if this stabilizes I'd in fact buy a surface pro or similar instead of a new notebook, should my current private notebook die).
jsiepkes 6y ago
> Scrolling is a 'no' in serious UI design Scrolling gives users a spatial feeling (ie. "what is where in relation to something else") in contrast to just magically letting things appear without animation or transition. There are plenty of UI designs which use scrolling. Sure you can debate whether they are a success or not but I've never head of "Scrolling is a 'no' in serious UI design". That sounds more like a personal preference. > and tiling should be an option. As far as I can tell there is nothing stopping you from simply using a workspace per app. Effectively disabling tiling.
- d3nj4l 6y ago
  You can't put windows on top of each other that way.
- dkersten 6y ago
  This has a stacking option too. You don’t have to use tiling.
- axilmar 6y ago
  > Scrolling gives users a spatial feeling The spatial feeling is necessary only if things take more space than needed. In this case, this is not valid. There are no things that take more space than needed. It's simply a distraction. > As far as I can tell there is nothing stopping you from simply using a workspace per app. Effectively disabling tiling. What if I want windows to be connected? that feature is not offered.

rvz 6y ago

> Designed to simplify navigation and reduce the need to manipulate windows in order to improve productivity. It's meant to be 100% predictable and bring the benefits of tools coveted by professionals to everyone. Oh dear. Now I remember why I keep using macOS which actually does it better than 'this'.

bestouff 6y ago

Looks nice, is there a video of how it works with multi-monitor setups ?

matt_f 6y ago

Love this. <3

5h 6y ago

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

Elv13 6y ago
You can have both! https://github.com/material-shell/material-awesome https://github.com/material-shell/material-awesome This was an earlier version of Material Shell based on AwesomeWM. At some point the author wanted more animations and custom menu handling. Those are 2 areas AwesomeWM doesn't really handle well.

generalk 6y ago

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.

phkahler 6y ago
Thanks for pointing out that it supports floating windows. I use a 55" 4k monitor so I manually lay out my app windows and would hate tiling (only rarely used stuff goes up top and I drag those down when needed). I use and like gnome but there are a few thing I hate about it so I'll give this a try.
- ycombinete 6y ago
  how far away from the screen do you sit?
  - 6y ago

aszen 6y ago

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/ https://regolith-linux.org/

mxuribe 6y ago
I'm going through a distro hopping phase, so recently hopped to Fedora spins (am currently on KDE)...but had heard of regolith separately and really liked the idea. So i went to DistroTest[0] and took it for a spin, and it won me over. I still ant to finish my experiment with fedora spins, but right after, I'll be heading Regolith! [0] https://distrotest.net/Regolith%20Linux/R1.1 https://distrotest.net/Regolith%20Linux/R1.1
gavinray 6y ago
I Ctrl+F'ed in this thread for Regolith, this should be higher. Zero setup, incredible keybindings. You can install it on top of your existing Distro, as an apt package. And then log out + log back in using new DE. I had never used a tiling WM before Regolith, i3 seemed too difficult to configure for someone who didn't truly didn't understand the point/benefit of using tiling WM's. A day into using Regolith on Ubuntu I was hooked. Been using it for years now and it's the best decision I've ever made, productivity skyrocketed and it looks nice. I tried Pop_OS shell's tiling WM, as I was hopeful, but the keybindings and behavior aren't as nice as Regolith. It does a "swap" animation when changing tile positioning that slows stuff down, and I could never get the gap borders to disappear completely.
barnabee 6y ago
Agree! Can't speak highly enough of Regolith. I'd actually somewhat given up trying to keep i3 working nicely and reverted to XFCE (which is at least far less obnoxious then Gnome 3) until I discovered Regolith and have been using it happily ever since.

squarefoot 6y ago

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?

yrro 6y ago

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 as my regular user), that quick terminal session I opened to work on a script, the SSH connection to an OpenStack director, the 'oc rsh' command that I'm using to administrate a PostgreSQL database running in OpenShift, and so on. This becomes far worse when using multiple monitors. Say I have teams hanging around on my secondary monitor to keep an eye on stuff. I literally just now alt-tabbed into a terminal and then alt-tabbed back to continue writing this comment. As a result, I'm back in Firefox on my primary monitor (as expected) but now I have an unwanted random Firefox window that I forgot was even open on top of Teams on my secondary monitor! The only window manager I've ever been at home with while using multiple applications, workspaces and monitors has been i3. Specifically I love how it manages multiple monitors in that each has a current workspace, but workspaces are not bound to a particular monitor. So I was able to have my secondary monitor always showing my 'Slack and email' workspace, and switch between my multiple task-based workspaces on my primary monitor and never get confused like I with GNOME where I want to switch to my email tab but to get there I have to remember ahead of time that I have to switch to my first workspace, then switch applications to Firefox, then switch windows to the one with Outlook in it, and finally switch to the Outlook tab... Anyway. This project looks awesome and I will try it out!

vladvasiliu 6y ago
You can kind of implement this in Gnome 3 by putting windows that go together on a workspace, the same way you do in i3. Hoewever, using workspaces in Gnome never felt as fluid as it does in i3.
dkersten 6y ago
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 guess since they’re not Wayland aware they can’t bypass the compositor?) So, I too will try this project out as it looks like it may be a nice middleground where I can be productive in gnome on X.

scoutt 6y ago

Can two windows overlap? Or are they just opened full-screen or inside a tile side-by-side? If not, then I don't like that very much. For example the calculator: I don't want it to take 1/3 or 1/4 of the screen. It's like going back into a 35 years ago pre DESQview era. Edit: nevermind. "In Material Shell windows are tiled. These means they are organised in a predictable way in which they do not overlap". I guess I like my windows to be not predictable, whatever that means.

approxim8ion 6y ago
I can't speak about Material Shell, but on dedicated tiling WMs, you get to select a subset of apps that you want to always open in floating mode to accommodate the use case you are describing. Nonetheless, I find myself not using that at all, since in most cases the tiled view allows for optimum use of screen real-estate in my opinion. If I can't see the entirety of a window it's kind of useless to me, so i'd prefer it be on a different workspace. But of course, floating one window like your calculator while your browser and RSS feed reader are tiled on the desktop is entirely possible and probably quite common. I do, however, use a popup rofi window with a custom script as a calculator, so that does indeed float near the top of my screen.
michaelmrose 6y ago
In i3 you can perform operations based on window criteria for example if calculator don't tile with for_window. KDE has window rules, Linux in general has devilspie2. If it doesn't have this feature it probably should.

bluewavescrash 6y ago

Cool website.

dave_sullivan 6y ago

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

nobleach 6y ago
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.
- Galanwe 6y ago
  I did start using i3 with Xephyr (Xnest at the time) inside gnome. That could be something you want to try. It basically allows you to have a X11 window running i3 inside your usual gnome session. While in full-screen, that gave me a gnome workspace that was effectively i3.
- jeromenerf 6y ago
  You can run "gnome-flashback" somehow below i3 using https://github.com/i3-gnome/i3-gnome https://github.com/i3-gnome/i3-gnome This is nothing too complicated, just a session with the right components selected to provide whatever services you need: display management, screen locking, WiFi, etc.

kevinherron 6y ago

One thing I've learned from using i3wm and trying various other tiling shells/scripts over time is a stacking mode is crucial to my workflow. It doesn't look like this has one. There's an outstanding PR to add stacking to Pop Shell [0] that I'm hopeful about. [0] https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell

heresie-dabord 6y ago

> "Improve your user experience and get rid of the anarchy of traditional desktop workflows." This usage of "anarchy" makes me wonder what is so satisfying to advocates of "tiling". I personally don't have a need for new windows to conform to a strict placement algorithm. My usability requirement for new windows: a) open the window in a timely manner and make it distinct so I can identify it; b) don't fiddle with my visual field unnecessarily. I use OpenBox. I make the "active" window distinct using a custom theme. I open what I need and hide the rest in a shaded window and/or virtual desktop until I need it. I find what I need in the menus. (I won't debate the qualities of Gnome, but I prefer a lighter DE.)

nsonha 6y ago

when is this material crap gonna die? There are gaps everywhere who wants more gaps in their DE?

jeromenerf 6y ago
I do. I don’t need them when every pixel counts but I think they are useful If not pleasing in many cases. That’s why I created what I believe was the first tiling wm "useless gaps" patch for dwm 10 years ago. Since then, it has been adopted by other wm, i3 being a notable exception. I don’t use a DE, but I guess a little space between those fat bars and backdrop’d windows might help to see through the bloat.
- nsonha 6y ago
  I was referring more to the excessive padding in material design in general, but yeah I'm not a fan of gaps so pairing that with gaps in tilling seems extra bloated to me.
  - jeromenerf 6y ago
    Oh yes, I see what you mean. I have yet to see an enjoyable material design app. With the same underlying motivations, I have better appreciation of Apple iOS interface guidelines.

mkaymalright 6y ago

I like it! There is just one thing I'm missing from Gnome which is the white dot on top of the time signifying there is an unread notification. With Material Shell I have to manually click the time to see if I have any unread emails or slack messages.

wayneftw 6y ago

Can the user merge the workspace panel into the the system panel and move all that to the bottom of the screen instead? I honestly can't stand global top bars and "system panels" that are nothing more than always-visible launcher menus. They're just a waste of space. IMO Chrome looks ridiculous in the video, with a set of tabs directly underneath the workspace panel tabs. What I'd really like to see is XFCE with automatic tiling. I can probably script a half-assed version of it myself without too much trouble, but it would be nice to have a full-assed version of that.

armoredkitten 6y ago
A few months ago I set up i3 to work within Xfce (essentially swapping out xfwm4 as the window manager), and I love it. It took a bit of tinkering to get the two to play nicely, as you might expect, but once I got it set up properly it was great. I wanted to use a tiling WM, but I had a setup I really liked with Xfce and didn't want to give up all the DE niceties with my panels, system tray, etc. This gives me the best of both worlds as far as I'm concerned. That said, I agree with you that it would be nice to have a built-in option to switch between tiling and floating. I've seen that Pop_OS has this, but that's also using Gnome.

sanqui 6y ago

This is so close to how I would want my shell to work! For instance, there is a floating mode which can be enabled per-workspace. Big fan of the persistency. I have a few nitpicks, but the author seems active on Discord and work is ongoing. Going to give this an extended ride for sure. EDIT: For Fedora users, apparently the package is quite outdated and missing some features and fixes. The author is going to make a new release on GitHub and hopefully package maintainers will make an update.

dubcanada 6y ago

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?

nobleach 6y ago
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 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.
riquito 6y ago
What's the exact issue? If you assign a bunch of workspaces (say 6,7,8,9) to the secondary monitor when it appears your flow shouldn't really change
michaelmrose 6y ago
The way multiple monitors work out of the box is that a workspace is created when you first switch to it on the monitor that is focused. This means that even if you always use foo on monitor bar you must switch to monitor bar before hitting the hotkey to switch to foo. If all you know is focus directional hotkeys you could trivially have to hit focus left 7 times to get to the left monitor for example before hitting super+3 to switch to 3. This is of course horrible. Your life would be simplified if you had a hotkey to focus output right and focus output left. This makes it not TOO laborious however your life would be simplified MUCH MUCH more if you used the assign directive to assign particular workspaces to particular monitors for example 1-5 on left monitor and 6-0 on right. You would accomplish this for example by using workspace 1 output name workspace 2 output name ... Then if you watch to switch to 3 on left monitor you don't have to worry about where you are presently you can simply hit super+3 wherever you are.
Galanwe 6y ago
Been using i3 daily with 3 monitors and no problem (2 external screens + laptop) for 10 years now. What is your problem exactly? I usually reserve [0] for the laptop, [1], [2], [3] and [4] for my left monitor, and [5] on my right monitor.

_def 6y ago

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)

chronogram 6y ago
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.
- justwalt 6y ago
  I use it as well, it shouldn’t be too hard to find by searching “top panel scroll” on the extensions site or something along those lines.
- _def 6y ago
  https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/701/top-panel-workspace-scroll/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/701/top-panel-workspa...

tkainrad 6y ago

I don't see why you would need such a complex system (spatial model) to switch between your apps. In my opinion, this has been solved perfectly many years ago. I simply use Super+<num> to launch/switch to my 10 most important applications. Supported out-of-the box by both Windows and Gnome and 100% predictable. Every shortcut invocation will launch exactly the right application.

nsonha 6y ago
I find that wierd too, and example of nerds cooking up something no one needs but then it catched on because nerdy things are hip now.
WealthVsSurvive 6y ago
(i3-gaps user) Tiling is basically an extension of this, and it can absolutely make your life easier if your work or play revolves around switching between workspaces that contain ~3+ windows each.

robertlagrant 6y ago

How is the tiling with multiple monitors?

yboris 6y ago

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

erickj 6y ago
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
dflock 6y ago
PaperWM is inspired by/implements parts of this: https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM/ https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM/

t0astbread 6y ago

Nice! I use i3 but I've always thought it would be great if it supported manipulating windows with the mouse as well. I don't use GNOME so this isn't for me but I like the idea.

Galanwe 6y ago
You can have floating windows with i3. Try meta-shift-space, you will get a floating window that can be dragged and resized with the mouse.
- t0astbread 6y ago
  I know about that and it's a handy feature but I meant the typical window operations (moving in the tile grid, resizing of grid rows/columns possibly also sending to other workspaces or the scratchpad and toggling floating or fullscreen mode via a context menu on the title bar)

michaelmrose 6y ago

How does this handle multiple monitors? Isn't the default on gnome 3 still to only switch the primary monitor when switching workspaces?

kevincox 6y ago
It doesn't appear to work well with multiple monitors. I could open apps on different monitors but not move them between. The native GNOME shortcuts just caused the windows to flicker and their shortcuts don't have anything to do with monitors.
- michaelmrose 6y ago
  https://github.com/material-shell/material-shell/issues/269 https://github.com/material-shell/material-shell/issues/269 >We are currently only compatible with the one workspace per external monitor mode since it's was the most adapted to my vision of the ideal workflow and also because altering the behavior of GNOME Shell can be a bit complex and maintain multiple mode can be very time consuming. Therefore step after step our code base is becoming more mature and I may be incline to work a second option if there enough demands. But we also have other fundamental stone to build like window resizing. Seems like figuring how it works across multiple monitors would be a rather basic building block but dev has different priorities it seems.

d2161 6y ago

So it's not a shell but a theme?

mikewhy 6y ago

I've always wanted to try a tiling window system, but they just don't seem to gel with how I work at all. Rarely, if ever, do I want a window to take up some common percentage of the screen. My editor is ~100 columns, which will change depending on the font / font size. My terminal is all over the place. My browser is multiple widths, because I need to test responsiveness, or what fits in my current tab does not fit what's in my next tab. Is there any sort of middle ground tiling solution for people like me?

redisman 6y ago
In Pop OS the windows can have two states. Stickied to a part of the screen with auto-tiling with other stickied windows or free floating. I would guess many Linux flavors can do something like that. To me the ideal solution was Spectacle for MacOS - key shortcuts for a window to take up the space of a predetermined space. I just don't think automatic tiling makes all that much sense unless you're building some kind of a dashboard. Tiling web browsers is especially bad since I use a lot of websites that flip to mobile mode or are just plain unusable when tiled into the wrong shape.
- narwally 6y ago
  For certain websites forcing them into their mobile version can be pretty useful, but it takes a bit of playing around to make everything work nicely together. I have a group of browser windows and a layout defined in stumpwm that includes gmail, spotify, and a few other sites that have good responsive design.
narwally 6y ago
Take a look at dynamic window managers. They allow for switching between tiling and floating windows.
gkop 6y ago
Linux: just use Gnome out of the box, the basic tiling is totally usable. It's extremely simplistic, but helpful enough to get you hyped on tiling. macOS: try Magnet app, it’s fantastic. Great out of the box config, fairly powerful (caveat: the mouse targets stink; but who uses the mouse anyway?)

felixfoertsch 6y ago

I really wish people would stop using "beautiful" as if it were an objective adjective.

ziftface 6y ago
I interpret that as meaning that good looks was one of their design goals. It doesn't necessarily mean everyone will find it pretty.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Ditto "fast".
- Narishma 6y ago
  Unless it's accompanied by benchmarks; then it's fine.

lubonay 6y ago

Am I the only one who thinks it's weird that there are no tests in the repo?

pimlottc 6y ago

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...

slingnow 6y ago
I would argue all of you suggested words are just as overused and meaningless as "modern". At the end of the day, I would still need to see the product to understand what it does.
- pimlottc 6y ago
  It's hard to describe a complex program with one word but I would argue they are at least more informative than "modern". Unless you're intentionally using old technology or going for a "retro-style", pretty much anything written in 2020 could be described as "modern". The alternatives listed as just examples, I would need to understand the program better to come up with a truly apt adjective.
- eejjjj82 6y ago
  without trying to nitpick I had a similar reaction as pimlottc. the Gnome-Shell title page is: "GNOME Shell, next generation desktop shell" so when I read modern on your description I just chuckled a bit. in any case great work on this. looks like a ton of work
arendtio 6y ago
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?

gigatexal 6y ago

meh, imo, regolith is peak desktop for linux right now. [1] [1] https://regolith-linux.org/download/ https://regolith-linux.org/download/

V6HBGNQHU 6y ago

Pop Shell from System76 also does something similar. That is a gnome shell extension that provides tiling window management. It's focus is keyboard driven window navigation and has the option to switch between tiling and floating mode. https://github.com/pop-os/shell https://github.com/pop-os/shell

mark_l_watson 6y ago
I was going to mention the same thing. I liked the old Pop Shell and have now been experimenting with the new tiling interface. Off topic, but System76 really seems like a great company. I enjoy my Linux laptop and their software support is good. I am stuck on Apple's platform for the Apple Watch and iPhone (and I like iPads), but I wonder if I would ever buy another Mac laptop. Turnkey Linux systems, like those of System76, Dell, etc. really make using Linux low overhead.

dzonga 6y ago

looks okay, tried it and bang! everything is in disarray. I found organising windows to be a pain. suddenly everything is in full screen mode. I thought the search would've been like the search provided by kde, i.e search through open windows no matter what app. that's one thing I miss about kde. and wish I could get in gnome.

miguelmota 6y ago

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.

asciimov 6y ago

Thinking about those default keybindings (super+<w,a,s,d>) make my wrists hurt. Since the typical keyboard only has super (win) on the left, they should've used super+ <i,j,k,l> or <h,j,k,l>.

bengalister 6y ago

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.

gkop 6y ago
Beg to differ that macOS is more stable and polished. macOS makes “arbitrary” UI changes over the major versions, including what I experience as regressions, while Gnome 3 keeps what works. And I experience more UI latency with macOS and a less-polished out of the box experience: Eg, macOS has no built-in tiling. Eg, macOS prohibits using the keyboard to interact with system modals unless you change settings. Eg, macOS hotkey for spotlight requires holding down a modifier key. Eg, macOS spotlight autocomplete is unbelievably brittle/dumb. Eg, macOS doesn’t allow changing the system font size, you must scale the whole viewport. (Can you tell I am required to use macOS at work? /facepalm)

y2kenny 6y ago

For folks who are looking for tiling without switching the windows manager, the gTile [0] GNOME shell extension is pretty good. [0]: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/28/gtile/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/28/gtile/

gkop 6y ago
Gnome has [very] basic tiling built in.

Angeo34 6y ago

People jump at the words minimal and modern but "Private secure and fast" is never questioned makes sense.

forbiddenvoid 6y ago

Installed and activated this morning. I'm already a fan. Easily revertible if I decide later that I hate it, but I like this workspace strategy much better than what's built-in with gnome. I did find it a bit challenging to figure out where the settings were located (I don't use many GNOME extensions).

forbiddenvoid 6y ago

anotheryou 6y ago

I want 2/3rd 1/3rd tiling

mmcnl 6y ago

There's much to love about Linux but the desktop experience is terrible. Windows and macOS are lightyears ahead.

fareesh 6y ago

I find everything other than KDE and lighter desktops really slow - even with good hardware

eximius 6y ago

I can't recommend AwesomeWM enough. You don't really have to customize it at all for the workspaces + basic tiling to be incredibly useful. And the workspaces can be per monitor!!! Or you can tie them together! Or use them as tags instead of workspaces! It's really just so good. I think the only thing I really added was audio key support and I changed the menu shortcut...? I'm not actually sure what the argument is to not use it. (it supports floating windows, if you want that as the default)

mqus 6y ago
> I'm not actually sure what the argument is to not use it. I'm currently using it, but if I switch away, it will be because there is no wayland support yet.
- eximius 6y ago
  Heh, valid point.
  - Elv13 6y ago
    Patches welcome :P But really, someone went quite far a couple year ago. Unfortunately he lost interest before the finish line. There is no such thing as a WM port from X11 to wayland. It's a full backend rewrite. The design that would have worked (after like 4 rewrite), but wasn't completed, was to have a WLroot process, then some custom protocols to talk to an awesome "client". This was a fork of the old codebase with the X11 code stripped out and the implementation of those little private protocols between the wlroot "server" and awesome "client". Using this model, the event loops lived in different process and AwesomeWM could restart without losing all applications. It did render stuff, including the wibar and clients (without titlebars). But that's about it. It never got to the point you could dog-food it.

satya71 6y ago

Looks nice and innovative. But GNOME already lost me as a user. Wish they'd make it independent of GNOME.

nomdep 6y ago

These "Workspaces" are called "Activities" in KDE (avaible since KDE 4 I think). I use them daily

einpoklum 6y ago

> for GNOME For the life of me, I can't understand why there are that many GNOME-based desktop environments. I personally dislike most of their approach to UI. Maybe the innards are very pleasant to work with, but it's GTK-based, isn't it? That a somewhat-dated C toolkit, even if it has bindings in other languages. So I kind of doubt that. And yet - MATE, Cinnamon, XFCE (ok, that's just GTK, not GNOME proper), Unity. This is not a rant, I'm actually curious why GNOME is that popular, and those projects did not choose some other basis. I mean, that should be possible, right? LXDE switched from GTK to Qt a few years back.

msb 6y ago
I will tell you why I use Gnome. Gnome/Fedora was the first distro that played nice with my 4k XPS display AND the various 2k and HD secondary displays I use. I switched from Ubuntu/XFCE about five years ago. As I get older, I look for applications and DE's that require as little mouse use as possible. In Gnome 3, it's super+space, type application name, enter and use. Super+arrow to snap around the screen. A minuscule top bar gives me the perfect amount of screen real estate. The only application that I like to tile is a terminal and tmux works just fine. So for my use, Gnome just seems to stay out of my way.

mrlonglong 6y ago

Somehow the title reminds me of Madonna's song Material Girl.

trilinearnz 6y ago

Looks really nice. I like how creative the Linux community is with their GUI experimentation. My favourite feature is the ability to tile windows with a little gap between them. Having visibility (even a little) into the wallpaper when you're doing work makes a big difference for me. It's like it grounds you in a more natural frame of reference. I'm sure Mac users can relate to this due to the late introduction of true window maximisation, but as a Windows user I'm coming to appreciate the "non-fullscreen" or "edge-to-edge tiled" working environment.

corytheboyd 6y ago

Please. Add. SCREENSHOTS! You lost me at having to watch a video. Just lead with a screenshot. A video is fine as supplemental marketing, but you NEED a screenshot otherwise you’re losing those first impression opportunities.

aabbcc1241 6y ago

I used to switch between gnome and cinnamon. I switched between them when one failed after update. They seldom fail simultaneously, but once that happened, I switched to awesome and never go back.

RMPR 6y ago

I really like the idea, maybe this can make me back to GNOME, but it seems to me it lacks an absolutely vital feature of i3/Sway: the scratchpad[0], I always have an Emacs buffer opened to my org folder, and the scratchpad is very handy. 0: https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_scratchpad https://i3wm.org/docs/userguide.html#_scratchpad

linuxdaemon 6y ago

I have tried to like tiling window managers and for whatever reason, it just hasn't clicked for me. I have really come to like the way default Gnome works. That said, I have used material-shell for about 1/2 an hour, and so far this is the first time I can see myself actually liking a tiling window manager. At the risk of being the guy who has used it for a minimal amount of time and starts complaining about it because it doesn't work like I'm used to...There are a couple preference things for me that I wish were a little different. I like gnome's no-frills fullscreen. You only have the app and the top panel stuff. In material-shell, I can SUPER+ESC to get full screen, but I think I want to be able to just mouse-over to the left side to bring up the panel while in full screen. To get to anything at the panel I have to SUPER-ESC first. Which is ok, I'd just rather it optionally auto-hide. Kind of the same as the left-panel, the top-panel workspace list looks especially jumbled when you have an app like a browser maximized. So you see the workspace list, then your titlebar, then your browser tabs. It just adds extra "business" that I would prefer to not see. And again, enabling fullscreen with SUPER+ESC basically gets me what I want so it's not that big of a deal. Finally, I understand why people would like it, but for me I would prefer to not have the "+" in the workspace switcher at all. Or at least minimally have it skip being part of my SUPER+A/SUPER+D switching. I REALLY don't like it showing up when nothing is open on my workspace or when I have a vertical split workspace, and only one thing on the screen and it shows the "+" content window. I am so accustomed to just hitting SUPER and then typing the app that I want, its way faster to do that and I'd rather the whole "+" window go away. All-in-all, I'm pretty satisfied with material-shell and will definitely be using it as my desktop.