gnome-shell-wsmatrix VS PaperWM

Workspace Matrix extension makes my day, every day.

I just had NixOS break in a weird way for me. Ok, it was more that Gnome 42.4 broke the wsmatrix extension, which caused Gnome to shit itself[1] on login.

It's a little bit of a double edged sword. NixOS lets me use pretty much straight upstream packages, which sometimes break due to not having thorough integration testing like a traditional distro would. On the other hand, I was able to just boot up an older configuration to get back to functional, and that let me figure out wtf was wrong.

[1]: https://github.com/mzur/gnome-shell-wsmatrix/issues/236

Implement the Workspace Matrix extension for GNOME https://github.com/mzur/gnome-shell-wsmatrix in Sway, possibly looking at Sway Overview for inspiration.

Hej, recently updated my laptop to 22.04 but after some years getting use to unity and 2 extra screens now seems i cannot find my way to have a decent wall of workspaces... i found a nice extension that works fine (https://github.com/mzur/gnome-shell-wsmatrix) but only seems to create the workspace wall on the latop screen and not on the other external screens...

Release info: https://github.com/mzur/gnome-shell-wsmatrix/releases

My main concern is a 2D grid for workspaces, with workspace previews in the workspace switcher popup. Workspace Matrix does an excellent job of adding this to GNOME.

it will assign a new font to the extension. Then you may use an icon font, such as Font Awesome, Icofont or icomoon (which also allows you to create your own!). You can then change the workspace names with dconf-editor with the characters from the font. PM me if you need any help :)

On GNOME there's a way to get native 2 dimensional workspaces, but AFAIK the only way to enable this is with an extension like workspace matrix. For ctrl+alt+arrow-like shortcuts be sure to set keybindings for switch-to-workspace-arrow and move-to-workspace-arrow in org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings. However, I had some issues with GNOME 40 like: - Changing workspaces with mouse scroll jumps to an adjacent workspace up/down (as expected). Without a device that has horizontal scroll (like a touchpad) you can't go to adjacent workspaces left/right. - There are multiple issues with the workspace thumbnails in the overview.

Ok, so, I'm using Workspace Matrix for a workspace grid.

But with auto-tiling you need to place windows according to a pre-set configuration, it needs to fit whatever layout you want to go for and it needs to be able to resize the window without breaking the content. This works pretty well for libadwaita apps, but a lot of webapps seem to assume a certain minimum window size. Another issue is how to handle modal dialogues, where paperwm for example sets an override to ensure they're not attached to the main window. Should the settings window then be treated as a separate window and tiled, or should it be left floating above all others?

I like Gnome's simplicity, agree with most of its deviations from the tired old Windowsy desktop status quo, and am very happy to depend on all its great integration work. I can't quite live with the simplistic window management, but extensions cover that (as they do much else). With Fedora + Gnome + PaperWM, I'm quite at peace with the current linux desktop situation.

Still I'm looking forward for something like PaperWM to be possible in KDE - or even to write it by myself

I have noticed in one of your comments in this thread that you are looking for novel ideas of the UI look. As others commenters stated, you might be interested in tiling window managers like i3 [0] or sway [1]. They are truly a gem for productivity and sometimes for an eye [2].

However, I love the concept of scrollable window manager like PaperWM [3] is. When I had a smaller screen (24" 16:9) I was complaining a lot on unused space on my screen. With PaperWM I was finally happy with its dimensions, because I could have huge IDE on the left and small part of terminal displayed on the right. That way I knew if something was printed to terminal, while my editor took 80% of the screen.

[0]: https://i3wm.org/

[1]: https://swaywm.org/

[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/

[3]: https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM

If you want something really different, give PaperWM a shot.

You may want to try PaperWM (GNOME extension) https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM