I am trying to switch from elementary OS to Manjaro. I have used Manjaro in the past but switched to elementary because I love the WM. Unfortunately gala doesn’t come up in the login screen.
Now I am trying to come back to Manjaro and install what I like about eOS. I installed the pantheon package from the manjaro repo. I then run gala --replace which crashes gnome and forces me to logout. Does anyone have experience replacing gnome’s wm & title bar with gala/wingpanel?
Edit: On a second look, gala --replace is actually starting gala. I guess the question is how can i disable gnome’s WM and start gala at boot so gnome doesn’t crash and prevent me from using my desktop.
Edit: I have changed the .xinitrc files DEFAULT_SESSION to gala. Nothing.
Yes. Don’t try it, it’s not worth the effort. Gnome session is not modular like xfce or mate. It’s easier to craft your own custom session from scratch than to repurpose gnome for it. If you want to use gnome elements, you can put gnome settings daemon and other stuff to your autostart.
@codesardine has more experience on running gala on a custom environment.
I’m all for a custom environment. This is a clean install of manjaro. I figured going from gnome to eOS packages would be easiest.
This is all on a separate partition so I have no problem with tinkering, configuring and getting it right before turning it into the daily driver I hope for.
What features of eos are you missing in particular? Does Gala do something specific that mutter doesn’? Some features are possible to achieve without using the same packages. Also, you can happily run pantheon file manager in other environments.
I just prefer the gala/wingpanel look and feel. I wanted to run arch/gala so i can have rolling releases. eOS 5 doesnt work well with high-refresh 4k screens but new mutter features have fixed that. Figured arch/gala woukd solve all issues for me. All there is too it. Plank, files, etc are easy to set up. No problems there.
Edit: I installed manjaro 20 xfce to see if its easier to remove the xfce stuff in place of eOS.
Enable lightdm and point it to your gnome session
In the gnome.session file, replace org.gnome.Shell with gala;gala-daemon
Uninstall gnome-shell and gdm (these clash with gala causing crashes)
Reboot.
If you want the pantheon greeter, install the package. The lightdm greeter session value is io.elementary.greeter