vertical-overview VS smart-auto-move

I happily used vanilla GNOME in the past for many years. Unfortunately they've been making some questionable changes recently, and now I need to use extensions to undo those changes... Essential extensions for me are Panel Corners, and either Vertical Overview or V-Shell.

Vertical Overview — To bring back the objectively superior vertical overview that was used to have with stock GNOME.

How is this better or different than vertical overview? https://github.com/RensAlthuis/vertical-overview

Easier might be to look for existing extensions which ignore Clutter.TextDirection.* altogether, and try to recreate/improve the GNOME Shell from them. To Starte, perhaps you're interested in bringing the Vertical Overview back?, I think all dash-to-* extensions order icons from left-to-right, or have some setting to invert the order, some let you change the position of each element like dash-to-panel.

Possibly Related PR: https://github.com/RensAlthuis/vertical-overview/pull/79 (not sure)

I'm used to horizontal workspaces and even prefer them, but the Vertical Overview extension had the feature of "static background" and "hide scaling workspaces" that I really liked. So, I extracted the code responsible for those into a new extension.

I was and still am very disappointed with the overview changes. I'm someone who has happily used stock GNOME for years and years. I've always tried to avoid extensions and custom themes, as I actually like the stock experience and appreciate the design decisions the GNOME team has made. But this overview change I really just cannot agree with. It forced me to go to the vertical-overview extension, but unfortunately that isn't really the same as how it was.

I was using GNOME without extensions for years, and loved it. Unfortunately with the latest release of GNOME I've had to start using the vertical-overview extension, since they redesigned the native overview screen in a way that's objectively inferior.

The icons are kind of useful, the Vertical Overview extension I use keeps them)

Smart Auto Move

With https://github.com/khimaros/smart-auto-move/ you can create a rule for certain windows to always be placed at certain places. You'll have to disable version validation before installing though, since it's not been updated for gnome 44 yet: gsettings set org.gnome.shell disable-extension-version-validation true ​

I've used this extension with good success https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4736/smart-auto-move/

I was told by EndeavourOS forums to use this extension which fixed my problem: Smart auto move

It's an Xorg/X11 bug, doesn't happen on Wayland though if I remember correctly. I use the Smart Auto Move extension to remember window sizes which prevents this issue from annoying the ever loving beep out of me: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4736/smart-auto-move/

There's a new extension called "Smart Auto Move". I don't know if it focus the the opened window, though.