Their design was more mobile type wherr you don’t minimize windows, you just switch between them or between spaces. I’ve used Gnome forever, including the rough times on Gnome 3.0, and I’ve always used a system tray as well. Never liked leaving clutter everywhere and imo it goes against the minimal design. But thankfully easily extendible.
As always there’s no such thing as a global “best” application. Building your system is a very personal thing. It all depends on your needs and liking.
My personal journey in the tiling WM world has started 20 years ago with awesomewm. Then I moved to i3 because it feels lighter to me while offering a configuration approach I preferred. After some times, I felt ready to “really” build my tiling WM and I moved to dwm.
I couldn’t be happier until I came across bspwm which is as suckless as dwm but EWMH compliant. I also love the nice approach of keybindings offered by sxhkd. What I appreciate the most is the no limit configuration power since you can integrate the very powerful program that writes messages on bspwm 's socket (bspc) in any scripts you can imagine. This let you create some crazy and very personal rules. For example, I designed one where bspwm is listening to my video player state and if not fullscreen it automatically resizes it to a given size and moves it to a specific position. I have another one that will apply borders only to 2 specific windows applications and use a different color for each one.
This is a very brief overview of what I’ve experimented. Your expectations and the time you want to deserve to your configuration may guide you on another path. Archwiki has a comparison of tiling WM may be a good starting point to help you in your decision.
Interesting. As a dwm guy I was unaware of ewmh standards. Have you used dwm to be able to compare? I love dwm, but it does behave in some cagey ways at times.
You know how hard it is to explain personal preferences when we talk about tiling WM but, as I mentioned in my first post, I would say that bspwm offer some further granularity. I didn’t thought that was possible after using dwm but to come back to my example I have bspwm listening to the state of my media player. Everytime it becomes floating, bspwm resize the window, place it on a specific position, and add a border to it. This is just one example. Also, even though you can use it with any tiling WM, sxhkd has been developed with bspwm in mind and offers the best keybindings management I’ve ever tested. Thanks to chords, several commands can be associated to independent keybindings within the same piece of code like so:
I’m already using sxhkd with dwm but it’s probably underdeveloped. I want something like that above but with an additional hotkey to change send the active window to a workspace and then switch to that workspace but I haven’t worked it up. I debated using a QMK tapdance feature for that but have never switched to my QMK keyboard.
I guess to get at my real question, dwm (or maybe more accurately some of the applications I run) generate windows in weird ways. Zoom for instance doesn’t generate notifications for things like unstable wifi, but rather tiles a new window for 2 seconds which is REALLY annoying. Also the window swallowing feature is pretty finicky for things like (n)vim+latex in continuous compiling situations.
It’s all fixable… But it’s just a massive headache since (on my work pc) changing a dwm config means logging out and back in to see the results.
I would need to go back to my old dwm config file but I think what you’re looking for is this patch. In bspwm this is achieved with the “follow” option as shown in my example.
To restart dwm without login out and back in you’ll need this in your .xinitrc:
Gnome spends a lot of time testing user designs that are simple and get the task done for the 99% marketshare they don’t have. They try not to be bound by our current approach to computers, and instead idealize what most of the world actually wants.
I think it’s a noble goal but will never touch it. I’m surprised other people do. That said, I’ll always support them because of how much they upstream.
I don’t have the answer, though im positive someone else here does. On Fedora, an appindicator extension is included with the distro, but disabled by default, and this is still suboptimal UX.
The biggest offender for me was the overview at login change with gnome 40. It was so controversial that it even pulled in Matt Miller to weigh in on the matter directly. The exchange is extremely disappointing
I still use gnome, and I feel that it’s still the most polished DE available, I’m just worried about what other changes they might incorporate without any user-centric reasoning.
It seems to be characteristic of the Gnome project’s philosophy to do things in what they consider the best way rather than the way a new user might expect. It’s an admirable commitment to deliberate design rather than copying, but it may also make it unappealing to some users. Personally I don’t enjoy using Gnome, but I know people who love it. Thankfully in the Linux world we have options.
I think you’re supposed to use the new notification panel now, which kinda works like those in android and ios, but it’ll take a while until 3rd party apps supporting them.
Try out LeftWM ! It’s a dynamic tiling window manager, and it’s a reamly cool project with a very nice community. It’s still a bit rough around the edges but it’s worth trying considering how much options it offers.
Unfortunately for this use case rough around the edges won’t do. If something doesn’t work instantly I get blamed for using nonstandard software so the most reliable is what I’m looking for really
For personal use I have no problem with rough around the edges (evidenced by my using hyprland on Nvidia lol)
I find it pretty easy to use when building my 3d print adapters, brackets, containers and very simple objects. But if, like me, spaghetti code is your natural language… OpenSCAD does you no favors.
AFAIK openSCAD is a code driven mesh format. So if you want to import openSCAD models into any other CAD software you have to convert the mesh to STEP or some other actual 3d object format during which there can be lots of error if the model is complex. I don’t have a lot of experience doing this but I just tried a model I had lying around from the dactyl keyboard project and converting it resulted in a lot of really broken surfaces.
This is a cool alternative that makes 3d objects instead of meshes (at least it says it does). zalo.github.io/CascadeStudio/ . Also open source but web based.
EDIT: I should mention that CascadeStudio seems to be abandoned, just a cool concept of a different way of doing code driven CAD.
It’s because of the COVID vaccine mind control chips he put in everyone. If he wants to cause a storm, he just makes the entire population of Norway start flapping their arms in unison, which causes atmospheric disruption that leads to storms.
Not only that, but they aren’t standardised, and Gnome really likes adhering to standards and staying away from anything they consider unstandardised or janky.
System trays really are a complete clusterfuck.
Sometimes the icons have colour, sometimes they don’t, sometimes they’re minimalist icons, sometimes they’re not. Sometimes you left click on them to do something, sometimes you need to right click, sometimes it’s both, sometimes they have their own menu UI, sometimes they integrate with the system’s, sometimes you can exit an app via them, sometimes you can’t, sometimes they give you notifications, sometimes they just do it through your standard OS notification system, etc.
They are an inconsistent mess. And we all know how anal Gnome can be about UX consistency.
Gnome in the past has expressed a desire for a standardised, cross-desktop system tray that fixes these issues, but tbh I’m sceptical it’d catch on. Not because other desktops wouldn’t get on board, but rather because app developers will just go “meh, we’ll just stick to what we have” and it won’t gain traction.
The best and most official explanation I’ve read is the 2017 GNOME blog post, Status Icons and GNOME.
Essentially, tray icons are a throwback to the days before designated notification and media playback APIs, and they now create some ambiguity for app developers, in addition to being ripe for abuse.
It’s a worthwhile read and the writer makes several valid points, but doesn’t address as much as I’d like in terms of actual solutions for things like instant messengers.
Personally, I would be happy if most traditional tray apps could be displayed in the dash, with status indicators, and started in a minimized state, but I still see the benefit of having some always-visible panel icons, such as instant messengers and VPN indicators.
I have tried openSCAD and FreeCAD, they are both good in their own right, but utimatly they also both have very steep learning curves. I suppose Blender can also be used for CAD but I have no experience with it. I just want to quickly design some parts for 3D printing as a hobby and don’t feel like spending hundreds of hours learning those tools. I am current using Onshape.com, it works well on Linux/Firefox, suits my needs and free to use with some limitations. But it is proprietary :(
I like that initial installation is reduced to the max ant then you can add what you need rather than removing what you don’t want. I guess thats a design philosophy where the alternative KDE interface tries to put everything in on initial installation I like as well that GNOME creates rails for app developer to achieve continuity in user experience throughout all apps
linux
Oldest
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.