Last update when my system which I am happily running for more then 4 years, has been change visually so much that it is almost unusable. Please do not misunderstand me, I am so happy I can use the system you made so great that I prefer it to anything else. The stability and not introducing changes which disturb my work are the main reason why I am using Manjaro for many years daily.
Now when I updated last time, all this went down to drain. It may be and probably is my fault somewhere down the line, which caused this GNOME 40 update completely ruin user interface on my system.
Background image gone
dock is at bottom instead of left side
dock is permanent instead of hiding
hot corners are back active
icons changed and are bigger
colors of interface changes slightly
and possible many small other things are different.
I can not work and even I invested some time to fix few things, still it is not as I had it before.
I have no idea how GNOME works and often do not really understand meaning of some terms, relations between extensions, themes, GNOME,… I was os happy when my system was not changing without me deciding on change. Now it happens and I wonder is this going to be as Win10 which changes with every update and eating my energy which I instead like to use for my work.
If there is some good soul here to help me to get back stable GNOME visual presentation, which will keep stable even when GNOME 75 will come, please do help.
Thank you in advance.
And of course, please tell me what information I need to provide in order you can help. Here are few I though may be useful:
OS Name: Manjaro Linux; Build ID: rolling
GNOME: 40.2.0
Wayland
I used to have Adapta-Eta-Maia theme applied and I set some custom fonts
All latest sw updates applied
Gnome 40 changed a lot from what you “knew”, hence a lot of extensions had to be updated to work with the new desktop design.
Open up Layout Switcher and set it to Manjaro Legacy.
Gnome 40 was tested intensely on unstable and testing branches, for almost 2 months, till it reached the point to be pushed to stable branch, yet here we are … the update got you by surprise
The adapta themes got no update at least since 2019, and as all older themes, could look off with the new Gnome 40.
Working and tested theme: Adwaita-maia that now replaced in the new ISO builds the Matcha theme.
Is not necessary to have a deep understanding of the code, but at least keep up with what they announce about the upcoming changes. That information was and is still available for 4 months already.
hate to tell you, but gnome has always been like that.
gnome 40 is the latest, you just need to go through the settings and set it up again.
not all extensions are compatible yet.
this is a con of a rolling linux.
Gnome is known to break UI with every 6 months update. We were happy to provide a normal look for so long and managed with extensions to minimize noticeable changes. However, with Gnome 40 it changed so much, that we can’t keep all the look we had in mind for Manjaro.
So if you created your own look during the last period, I’m sorry to tell you that we can’t support that anymore.
You can download the last 21.0 ISO of Gnome to boot it up in Live-Session, so you may see what we did with 3.38 Gnome Shell back then. With the upcoming 21.1 ISOs we migrated to Gnome 40, which changed a lot.
For consistency you may change to Cinnamon, XFCE or try KDE Plasma.
Bogdan,
thank you very much for your answer. Adapta-Eta-Maia is in my settings s I was assuming it works well. Anyway I have decided to select something which seems to be more in active development and what is close to it. I found Prof-Gnome-theme, even not being in GNOME theme selection works well and better then Adapta-eta-maia.
Layout switcher indicated that I am on Legacy still the dock been moved. I fixed that in extensions settings for the dock.
Your suggestion to keep up what GNOME announce is probably good, but my whole point to select Manjaro was stability and have it as tool to support without disturbing my work. There are already too many things to keep up with ;-).
I like GNOME from UI view, simple, fast and still nice.
Anyway I have last thing which bugs from after this GNOME 40 move.
When I boot and I am going to log, the mouse cursor is displayed as sort of square with a sort of pattern. Once I log it is refreshed and become arrow as I am use to.
Together with that after log in the GNOME is in the same state as I would push ESC key. I am not sure how you properly call it. I can see all apps in overview and on top of that workspaces. This never happen after log in before. now I need to press ESC again to get it out.
Could you help me sort this out?
Thank you very much.
-r-
That might be, but some configs need to get updated to use the newer definitions, so, switch to another layout and then back to your favorite one.
Manjaro is a rolling distribution, hence will always bring the newest changes in DEs and packages. If upstream makes major changes, Manjaro can’t do much about that, but push forward.
Either an issue with the default cursor theme, or some corruption that might be related to Mesa … Never seen that before. Probably somebody else will have some hints.
That is the new look of Application Overview, where you also see the Workplaces preview. If you set Esc as your default Meta key, then what you describe is normal.
I use Win key as Meta key - when i press it once i see the opened windows and Workspaces Overview, if i press it quickly/twice i see the Application icons under smaller previews of the Workplaces.
Please share with us the output from terminal for inxi -Fazy - so we can see if you somehow are still using an old kernel that might be EOL …
I also use Win key, but one can cancel it by ESC. What I try to convey is that display is in this state of application Overview after I log in a do nothing. I have to press ESC to cancel it. This behaviour was not before.
I am using kernel 5.10. Here is the output from inxi. interesting xommand never heard of before but nice information.
Not sure, but maybe this is relevant. I have no other option for cursor in Tweaks. Only one, Adwaita(default). I wanted to add screen shot, but I always get error that I can not insert image in reply. Strange
Thank you all for you kind help. Currently there is only one issue which is sort of cosmetic, but irritating nevertheless.
Mouse ponter is square when system boots or when I logout at the login screen. Mouse is moving and I can click. It only look like square instead of arrow. When I log it reposition at the same position as after boot or logout and changes to proper arrow pointer.
Interesting that this original position of the mouse is almost right bottom let say 4/5 horizontal from left and 1/5 vertical from bottom.
I did little experiment and switched from gdm to lightdm. After restart of my computer lightdm prompt has appeared with correct arrow like mouse pointer in the center of the screen.
When I moved back to gdm, it was back to small square (size of normal mouse pointer) and close to right bottom of the screen as before.
Does this indicate the issue is in GDM or its settings?
P.S.: I was not able to log in into GNOME from lightdm.
Next observation after another test. I disabled Wayland and run GDM with X11, mouse cursor was ok in form of arrow, but still placed in right bottom corner as described above. I couldn’t log same way as with lightDM. May it has something to do with not complete X11 installation? I do not know.
Now I would say it has something to do with wayland (square instead of arrow shaped of mouse cursor) and GDM ( the position of mouse in corner and not in the middle of the screen).
Could somebody suggest what to look in logs or some other experiment?
You can indeed also check out other DEs, KDE Plasma even has some kind of global themes to mimick other DEs … not perfectly, but they may provide a good starting point to find your optimal fit.
All DE at some point have some major changes. Even KDE I guess (just not so long ago they change the application-launcher/start-menu completely, a complete redesign in appearance and functionality). But yeah from what I read GNOME might be the worst for that.
I guess the unfortunate reality is that we have to go with the flow (especially on a rolling release like Manjaro), and sometimes adapt and/or rebuild from the ground-up when thing have major changes.
