gnome-shell-wsmatrix VS sway

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.

This is partially why i use tools like i3 (/ sway). i like the tool; it works extremely well for me; the design has stayed the same for 20 years; there's no profit motive to come along and fuck everything up. it just works. it is boring in the best way possible.

I also have crashes on sway, but there’s a rough workaround now which prevents the issue totally.

I believe there’s a design issue with Firefox and GTK handling input events; some Wayland compositors have workarounds but others do not.

https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/7645

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1743144

Firefox is my preferred browser and I hope we can keep its engine alive in this era of Chrome dominance.

I'm seeing this: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Setting-Environmental-Variables but I haven't figured out how to make GDM do it, and I was wondering if there was a super simple "HEY SWAY READ MY .PROFILE" thing I could do.

So I searched around and found the following bug report where this problem and a possible solution was borough up: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/issues/2966 , which was then immediately closed again.

I've been using Sway since late 2019. I like the workflow of a WM. I honestly find it hard to go back to a DE, I like having a minimalistic desktop.

Sway is fast, minimal, and flexible. Their recommended tools/addons are worth a look: https://github.com/swaywm/sway/wiki/Useful-add-ons-for-sway

From that list I use greetd + tuigreet as my login manager, sway-launcher-desktop for FZF-powered app launching, and wob for lightweight brightness and volume display (send '50' to the wob socket and it'll show 50%; it doesn't get simpler).