material-shell VS i3

I really want https://material-shell.com/ for MacOS

it was perfect for using a single monitor

kinda like a deterministic alt+tab, you set up the layout of "workspaces" and they're always in the same place

I keep getting annoyed at alt+tab because I accidentally clicked on another window and now the order is messed up

I'm confused. How does that work? Is it like a GNOME extension or something; similar to how Material Shell works?

check this gnome plugin https://github.com/material-shell/material-shell

I don't know too much about that. You can achieve a lot with gnome extensions. And if you'd like to build your own and see what's possible, check out the source code of Material Shell

Website: https://material-shell.com/

Material Shell has Gnome 44 support: https://github.com/material-shell/material-shell/releases/tag/44

But you might want to try out Gnome first, with one of the many tiling extensions, or perhaps Material Shell for a Tiling like WM experience

Has anyone used Material Shell? It looks like it will do the tiling for me.

Hi, I'm working on Ubuntu 22.04.1 with Gnome 42.5. I used to be able to install shell extensions just fine with the Chrome extension. However (I think since (un)installing the Material Shell Extension), I can't install any extension anymore, not via the Chrome extension, not via the terminal (`gnome-extensions install -f ...`). In the browser, the switch is available and clickable, but nothing simply happens. Via the terminal, no feedback at all is given. When going over the [source code](https://github.com/material-shell/material-shell) of the material shell, it seems that it tampers with some extensions and God knows what else... Via `dconf` I had to enable the allowance of extensions (`disable-user-extensions`), also something Material Shell probably did. I uninstalled Material Shell according to the docs, but of course, not everything is undone...

While I believe Memory Saver was a great improvement, it only works if the tab is hidden or the window minimized. I recently learned the required state is not triggered if the tab is open but on another virtual desktop. At least this is the case with many of not all Linux window managers. Some of the many discussion threads on the topic:

https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/4353

> This is very true, and unfortunately there are very few people working on linux accessibility (including not me! I am part of the problem!).

Accessibility work itself ironically suffers from an accessibility problem. I brought up i3wm above, the issue for that is pretty illuminating: https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/3393

It's not that the devs are saying "this doesn't matter", the devs behind one of the most popular tiling window managers in the X11 ecosystem are saying, "this does matter, but we don't know how to fix it. We don't know what changes we'd need to make to get Orca working."

It's a really fundamental breakdown that's kind of a tragedy because I honestly believe that if accessibility communities were more heavily baked into testing and development in Linux and if this wasn't treated like two separate worlds, it would be better for everyone -- fixing accessibility concerns very often improves interfaces across the board and makes them more powerful.

But... how do you bridge that gap? I don't really know, I tried looking into Orca to see what would need to happen here and bounced off of it pretty hard, it's not a very approachable tech stack and there aren't tutorials or getting started guides. And on the other side of the issue I can preach about needing accessibility input during interface design, but I'm not in a position to give specific advice because I don't use screenreaders or alternate control schemes and I don't know what the biggest problems are.

The people who need to be involved in that process can't get involved because there's a tech barrier in place even for technically inclined people, and because the underlying software locks them out from the start. i3wm isn't ever going to get someone who's intimately familiar with Orca to jump into the conversation because the people who need to use Orca can't use i3wm. So that leaves the people who can address that tech barrier, but they don't know what to do or how to approach the problem because of the lack of involvement and because the communities are isolated from each other. So it's a chicken-and-egg problem and I don't know how to solve it.

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 use MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid-2014) with Manjaro as OS using i3 as a window manager. It isn't perfect, but I'm thrilled with it. I have been a Mac OS user for the last 15 years and wouldn't change what I have now for a Mac OS because I don't need more than what I'm using for development.

Even though, we have moved the official i3 support channel to GitHub discussions, i3's biggest community is still on reddit and if things continue like that there is going to be a lot of helpful content on an increasingly closed platform.

for example, take i3. https://github.com/i3/i3/issues/4478

For daily usage I really like kubuntu with i3wm, but it takes some configuration and getting used to the shortcuts, but it's well worth it