GNOME 43 is Here. What's Working, What's Not?

Thx, I am in reclining mode already! :sleeping:

@ricklinux has been lurking the Gnome category for many moons and I know there must be a deep love hate relationship :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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I couldn’t resist and ended up installing a Fedora 37 VM to give it a try. So far, I agree with @anon11595408 - nothing too exciting…

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That might be good thing, it means the desktop works!

I like the new fedora wallpaper.

It’s not really supposed to be anything exciting. It’s just a handful of core apps updated to GTK4/libadwaita with maybe a new feature or two, but nothing ground breaking. This is how the next couple of Gnome releases are going to go; get everything ported to GTK4 and fine tune some of the desktop elements. This is the case since most of the porting that still needs to be done takes a lot of work and time.

Just because something is a new release doesn’t mean it’s going to automatically blow your pants off. I’m just grateful they haven’t removed anything significant or flipped the dock to the right side of the screen in the name of usability or something… I might need some caffeine…

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Two things gnome needs to my opinion. 1) it needs to better deal with multiscreen and independent workspaces. 2) dark theme seems is not yet integrated across apps or still needs some work.

And of course enable dash to panel.

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I’ve stopped using dash to dock and started using cosmic dock. It’s been much much better.

Unless there’s some official mock-ups somewhere, Gnome devs are not going to integrate to a dash to panel setup. Thankfully they’re still actively supporting extensions so you’ll always have that option to do it yourself, but it’ll be a post-install tweak which isn’t all that hard to do.

If you’re referring to Wayland multi-screen support, expect another year or two realistically before that gets ironed out to an even better state. Works for some, but not for others and a lot of that is still going to take more time, but nonetheless progress is being made each month so it’ll get there better.

On Gnome 42 I use the dark theme, and force any GTK4 and flatpak app to default to the dark theme so I’ve never had a problem. But I also don’t switch themes willy nilly, once I go dark, it stays dark. There have been one or two reports for Gnome 43 dark theme issues, but that could be a bug that affects some users.

That works pretty well, I mean multi screen support and scaling. Also connecting disconnecting screens works super well at the moment. No problems with Wayland.

However, let’s say on my laptop I have 3 workspaces and on external screen I want to add 3 other workspace that work independently. I think it is not possible to do it at the moment. Also moving apps between workspace on different screens with keyboard shortcuts. I am still checking this out as I just installed gnome over the weekend.

That would be another feature I would appreciate. Being able to schedule dark mode once the sun goes down, and light mode in the morning. Not sure but don’t think there is such a schedule except for blue light.

If I could make Gnome look this good I might actually like it. :slightly_smiling_face:

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There are keyboard shortcuts to move the current app to a different workspace, but they are disabled by default. I only have one laptop, so I can’t test out how that looks when dealing with more than one display/workspace.

If you’re curious to test it though, open Gnome Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts and then use the search bar to look up “workspace” and feel free to adjust any of those settings to see if maybe that is enough for you for now.

As for the dark theme, there is an extensions that currently supports Gnome 42/43 that does that and more and is highly recommend. I used to use it in the past when I wanted something like that. It’s called Night Theme Switcher and it changes themes, icons, backgrounds, etc to whatever time you want.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2236/night-theme-switcher/

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Already using that :grin:

but the way gnome handles workspaces is not satisfying on multi screen. I am looking for a similar behavior to i3wm. Somehow it only lets me choose one screen as the master screen, the other one can only extend one workspace at the moment. As opposed to multiple workspaces that work independently on both screens.

Also the overview mode doesn’t show several workspaces on both screens. Don’t know if that expresses better my small beef with gnome.

Will try to see if I can screenshot.

Awesome thanks for that!

You’re probably not the first user to have an issue with that. I’d start looking up bug reports for multi-screen workspace issue(s) and seeing what turns up. More than likely it’s probably something already being worked on, but it may not be of the highest priority.

Yeah, I think it is not considered a bug but a feature that hasn’t been implemented yet.

Just speculating, but if that is the case and it’s not already in Gnome 43, then you’ll have to wait for Gnome 44 to get that functionality perhaps.

Ah I see, it was already a topic when gnome 40 came out. I think they are working on it. Here is what they said in 2021:

In case there’s any doubt: multi-monitor is absolutely a priority for us in the shell design and development team. We know that the multi-monitor experience is important to many GNOME users (including many of us who work on GNOME!), and it is something that we’re committed to improving. This applies to both the default workspaces behaviour as well as the workspaces on all displays option

This website describe the workspace behavior I meant and also limitation.

https://blogs.gnome.org/shell-dev/2021/02/23/gnome-shell-40-and-multi-monitor/

For me that would be a game changer, I multitask big time with multi monitors and multi screens. They did a fine job already with Wayland, no glitches at all.

That was over a year ago and last I’ve read up on most of this year, even from that blog, has been Gnome shell mobile work, so some priorities might have shifted a little bit perhaps. But like I said, I haven’t followed multi-screen support extensively so ultimately my guess is as good as yours.

Improved Multi-screen support wasn’t mentioned on the Gnome 43 release blog, so I can only assume work is still ongoing.

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