[Call for Testers] GNOME Layout Switcher: New Tiling Layout

Manjaro Development QA
1

Good news, everyone! There is a new tiling layout, but the old one is gone!

After much deliberation, we have concluded that Material Shell and Pop Shell are no longer viable. The Material Shell developer has been having trouble keeping up with recent Mutter and GNOME Shell changes for awhile now. System76 is only maintaining Pop Shell for Pop!_OS 22.04 which uses GNOME 42. They are currently focused on their upcoming Cosmic Desktop Environment completely written from scratch in Rust. In both cases, some issues are due to regressions that do not affect anything other than extensions like this.

:warning: If you decide to keep Material Shell or Pop Shell installed or install them via other means, no official support will be provided.

Without further ado, let’s get on with it already!

The new Tilling layout includes Forge and Space Bar to optimize your workflow utilizing tiling similar to i3-wm and vim-like keyboard shortcuts.

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Screenshot from 2023-06-17 13-46-56
Screenshot from 2023-06-17 13-46-561920×1080 437 KB

Changelog:

  • Material Shell layout has been renamed to Tiling layout using Forge and Space Bar
  • Use Gnome 4x UI Improvements for modified layouts for consistency
  • Improve code utilizing Pylint
  • General fixes and improvements

:information_source: Please note the updated optional dependencies. For testing purposes, please make sure all extensions are installed.

Optional Deps   : gnome-shell-extension-arcmenu: Traditional & Tiling layout
                  gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-dock: Manjaro layout
                  gnome-shell-extension-dash-to-panel: Traditional layout
                  gnome-shell-extension-forge: Tiling layout
                  gnome-shell-extension-gnome-ui-tune: Manjaro, Traditional & Tiling layouts
                  gnome-shell-extension-space-bar: Tiling layout

gnome-layout-switcher 0.8.36-1 is now in the unstable and testing branch for testing purposes available in all branches. Please test and provide feedback.

Special thanks to @Chrysostomus, @bogdancovaciu & @papajoke

1 Like
2

No feedback? Well, there must be no bugs then! :+1:

I’ll push it to the testing branch shortly.

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I’ve not tested the layout switcher yet but reporting that in testing my setup with pop-shell does not break after the update.

4

The update to Layout Switcher is not related to Pop Shell other than it was one of the packages dropped from the repos in the process. All are available in the AUR:

gnome-shell-extension-material-shell
gnome-shell-extension-pop-shell
pop-launcher
pop-shell-shortcuts
tela-icon-theme
plata-theme
5

Ah, thanks for the info.

Pamac reports the pop-shell-shortcuts package as Repository : None
There is a package pop-shell-shortcuts-git in the AUR
pop-launcher is in the AUR

I’ll do some cleaning and find some tiling solution that will fit me.

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Forge dev are looking for a maintainer : Looking for new maintainer · forge-ext · Discussion #276 · GitHub