10 ms·

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

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?
  - phkahler 6y ago
    Looks like between 2 and 3 feet - closer to 2. I use the huge monitor like the virtual desktop - we've all heard the metaphore but don't really use it. Spreading things out left to right is fine, but I don't like to tilt my head to look up (I have progressive lenses so that's worse for me than younger people), so the top is - like further away areas of a desk - where I shove things I don't need right now but want nearby. So if you're wondering how I can see the whole thing up close the answer is that I don't need to or try to. I might roll my chair back a bit if I want to watch a full-screen video.
    - ycombinete 6y ago
      That’s an interesting approach. I can picture the system quite vividly. You’ll probably use 100% scaling?
- ebiester 6y ago
  Tiling people would create a group up on the top. When you want to bring it down, it's just a keyboard command away. After going back to mac (for work reasons), It's been a painful experience adjusting to the lack of tiling.
  - confounded 6y ago
    > After going back to mac (for work reasons), It's been a painful experience adjusting to the lack of tiling. Same situation, I use ‘yabai’ on macos, which is similar enough to i3 for me.
    - dashwav 6y ago
      Yabai (https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai) and skhd (https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd) together makes a very powerful combination that works extremely well. It's as close to i3 as you can get on MacOS, and outside of a few odd things with 3 monitors I haven't run into any issues. Yabai is actually the second iteration of tiling windows that koekeishiya has made and it's super well developed.
      - whoisburbansky 6y ago
        Seconding this; the only thing I miss from i3 is the fact that yabai almost by definition can't be better integrated with the OS, so there's a slight increase in latency that's barely perceptible but enough to make me notice how much zippier my Linux boxes + i3 are. Small price to pay for how much more comfortable they make me on macOS, though.
  - michaelsbradley 6y ago
    Tiling isn't particularly difficult to implement on macOS with e.g. Phoenix: https://github.com/kasper/phoenix/ https://github.com/kasper/phoenix/ I hacked something together several+ years ago (see below) based on someone else's config, and I've maybe edited it twice since then, so it likely can be substantially improved. Also, I'm sure it's not as slick as a true tiling manager, but I've certainly gotten a lot of mileage out of it: https://gist.github.com/michaelsbradleyjr/a8ef81982420d0611878d5f521652c5a https://gist.github.com/michaelsbradleyjr/a8ef81982420d06118...
andrepd 6y ago
I use cinnamon, for that very reason. Just works, and works well for my use case, is very stable, and I've no wish to learn and configure another desktop paradigm.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  Lack of Wayland support is the single thing I have wish it had. Gnome is so smooth on Nvidia in comparison but in every other way I prefer and still use cinnamon
  - greendude29 6y ago
    Hmm, interesting. I user Gnome on Nvidia, but use the open drivers since Nvidia was difficult to get to a stable state. Did you just install the nvidia drivers from your OS's repo or get them directly from Nvidia? NB: The free drivers are working splendidly by the way
    - noir_lord 6y ago
      akmod-nvidia because it just works on a 2080.
    - orestarod 6y ago
      The free drivers work in the sense that you get a working desktop. But by no means can you get good performance on something that puts something other than light burden to your card. Nvidia gives no clues as to how to implement clock boost over the minimum base frequency in driver, so the free driver only uses the minimum available computing power, enough to get the desktop running.
  - croh 6y ago
    Cinnamon with Mint is very stable and tuned, very good to get job done. It has very low cpu consumption. I don't know why but gnome always eats lots of resources. Plus this very old famous bug, keep me away from gnome-shell for good. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=733297 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=733297
cflewis 6y ago
How do you access the Material Shell settings? I can't find them _anywhere_.
- globuous 6y ago
  Open up gnome tweak tool, go in the extensions tab, and on the "material shell", there is a little cog next to the switch. Click on it and there you have the available configuration options made available. Actually, this is how you can configure most shell extensions ;)
danans 6y ago
> 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 My approach is to use the window manager best suited for the task, but all at the same time. That means for my highly structured multi-desktop, multi-git-workspace programming tasks I use i3, which is ideal for those. However for my less structured tasks like writing or consuming documentation, email, and personal web browsing, I use a more conventional, less constrained desktop environment (i.e gnome), which is more ideally suited for those tasks. If I'm willing to abuse the term window manager a little further, Vim running inside i3 serves as a third window management environment I run in parallel, optimized specifically for code editing. The trick is that I use i3 in its own separate Linux desktop window (In my case running on a remote machine, but you could just as well do this running in a local VM). this allows me to have both environment successful on the same screen at the same time. This also has the added benefit of making it very easy to find my code editing window among the tons of other windows I have open.
Naac 6y ago
I would check out Regolith[0]. It's i3 on top of gnome, so you get the best of both worlds. It's available as a distro or an Ubuntu PPA. [0] https://regolith-linux.org/ https://regolith-linux.org/
- nyolfen 6y ago
  i switched to regolith a few months ago on my desktop and +1 this; convenient defaults that are relatively close to what i previously built up on my own, and overall a nice preconfig for i3+rofi. the only real tweak it needs out of the box is enabling tray icons.

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?
- phkahler 6y ago
  Looks like between 2 and 3 feet - closer to 2. I use the huge monitor like the virtual desktop - we've all heard the metaphore but don't really use it. Spreading things out left to right is fine, but I don't like to tilt my head to look up (I have progressive lenses so that's worse for me than younger people), so the top is - like further away areas of a desk - where I shove things I don't need right now but want nearby. So if you're wondering how I can see the whole thing up close the answer is that I don't need to or try to. I might roll my chair back a bit if I want to watch a full-screen video.
  - ycombinete 6y ago
    That’s an interesting approach. I can picture the system quite vividly. You’ll probably use 100% scaling?
ebiester 6y ago
Tiling people would create a group up on the top. When you want to bring it down, it's just a keyboard command away. After going back to mac (for work reasons), It's been a painful experience adjusting to the lack of tiling.
- confounded 6y ago
  > After going back to mac (for work reasons), It's been a painful experience adjusting to the lack of tiling. Same situation, I use ‘yabai’ on macos, which is similar enough to i3 for me.
  - dashwav 6y ago
    Yabai (https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai https://github.com/koekeishiya/yabai) and skhd (https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd https://github.com/koekeishiya/skhd) together makes a very powerful combination that works extremely well. It's as close to i3 as you can get on MacOS, and outside of a few odd things with 3 monitors I haven't run into any issues. Yabai is actually the second iteration of tiling windows that koekeishiya has made and it's super well developed.
    - whoisburbansky 6y ago
      Seconding this; the only thing I miss from i3 is the fact that yabai almost by definition can't be better integrated with the OS, so there's a slight increase in latency that's barely perceptible but enough to make me notice how much zippier my Linux boxes + i3 are. Small price to pay for how much more comfortable they make me on macOS, though.
- michaelsbradley 6y ago
  Tiling isn't particularly difficult to implement on macOS with e.g. Phoenix: https://github.com/kasper/phoenix/ https://github.com/kasper/phoenix/ I hacked something together several+ years ago (see below) based on someone else's config, and I've maybe edited it twice since then, so it likely can be substantially improved. Also, I'm sure it's not as slick as a true tiling manager, but I've certainly gotten a lot of mileage out of it: https://gist.github.com/michaelsbradleyjr/a8ef81982420d0611878d5f521652c5a https://gist.github.com/michaelsbradleyjr/a8ef81982420d06118...

andrepd 6y ago

I use cinnamon, for that very reason. Just works, and works well for my use case, is very stable, and I've no wish to learn and configure another desktop paradigm.

noir_lord 6y ago
Lack of Wayland support is the single thing I have wish it had. Gnome is so smooth on Nvidia in comparison but in every other way I prefer and still use cinnamon
- greendude29 6y ago
  Hmm, interesting. I user Gnome on Nvidia, but use the open drivers since Nvidia was difficult to get to a stable state. Did you just install the nvidia drivers from your OS's repo or get them directly from Nvidia? NB: The free drivers are working splendidly by the way
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    akmod-nvidia because it just works on a 2080.
  - orestarod 6y ago
    The free drivers work in the sense that you get a working desktop. But by no means can you get good performance on something that puts something other than light burden to your card. Nvidia gives no clues as to how to implement clock boost over the minimum base frequency in driver, so the free driver only uses the minimum available computing power, enough to get the desktop running.
- croh 6y ago
  Cinnamon with Mint is very stable and tuned, very good to get job done. It has very low cpu consumption. I don't know why but gnome always eats lots of resources. Plus this very old famous bug, keep me away from gnome-shell for good. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=733297 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=733297

cflewis 6y ago

How do you access the Material Shell settings? I can't find them _anywhere_.

globuous 6y ago
Open up gnome tweak tool, go in the extensions tab, and on the "material shell", there is a little cog next to the switch. Click on it and there you have the available configuration options made available. Actually, this is how you can configure most shell extensions ;)

danans 6y ago

> 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 My approach is to use the window manager best suited for the task, but all at the same time. That means for my highly structured multi-desktop, multi-git-workspace programming tasks I use i3, which is ideal for those. However for my less structured tasks like writing or consuming documentation, email, and personal web browsing, I use a more conventional, less constrained desktop environment (i.e gnome), which is more ideally suited for those tasks. If I'm willing to abuse the term window manager a little further, Vim running inside i3 serves as a third window management environment I run in parallel, optimized specifically for code editing. The trick is that I use i3 in its own separate Linux desktop window (In my case running on a remote machine, but you could just as well do this running in a local VM). this allows me to have both environment successful on the same screen at the same time. This also has the added benefit of making it very easy to find my code editing window among the tons of other windows I have open.

Naac 6y ago

I would check out Regolith[0]. It's i3 on top of gnome, so you get the best of both worlds. It's available as a distro or an Ubuntu PPA. [0] https://regolith-linux.org/ https://regolith-linux.org/

nyolfen 6y ago
i switched to regolith a few months ago on my desktop and +1 this; convenient defaults that are relatively close to what i previously built up on my own, and overall a nice preconfig for i3+rofi. the only real tweak it needs out of the box is enabling tray icons.