Support GNOME 40

[jsravn]

@hedning hopefully all is okay! They have not been seen in 7 months so I assume maintenance of paperWM is dead. There are no alternatives sadly as far as I can find, paperWM is pretty unique in the tiling WM landscape.

[cstich]

@jsravn The closest alternative I can think of is Pop Shell. Although with system 76 planning to ditch Gnome entirely I am not sure how long they will actually still keep developing that.

Maybe someone has to fork PaperWM? I have absolutely no idea about either JS nor Gnome development, so I am probably not the right person to lead this but I am happy to help if anyone is working on Gnome 40 support.

[jsravn]

I think if I want i3 style tiling I'd just use Sway which I used for a long time before PaperWM. I find PaperWM's approach superior on widescreens and large monitors where you can easily center what you're working on. i3 is really painful for this kind of screen imo - it is more ideal for laptop screens or smallish < 27" where you have the whole display in your vision.

If someone has the time to fork until hedning is back that would be great, as we can start merging PRs there to fix the various issues.

[deejayem]

https://github.com/cardboardwm/cardboard may be a possibility:

"Cardboard is a unique, scrollable tiling Wayland compositor designed with laptops in mind. Based on wlroots...

The idea of scrollable tiling comes from PaperWM."

[jsravn]

Cardboard looks pretty cool - however it's in a similar state with an inactive maintainer. I may try giving it a spin though when I get the time.

[derrix060]

I was also searching for a similar WM and found https://github.com/material-shell/material-shell.

At least it is still being supported...

[smichel17]

First— six or seven months of inactivity does not mean abandoned.

It might mean that the maintainer is busy with other things, and that maintenance will resume when they are personally affected. For example, I maintain [Red Moon](https://github.com/libreshift/red-moon), currently in [low maintenance mode](https://github.com/LibreShift/red-moon/issues/281), aka maintained to a level of "works for me". Red Moon hasn't received a major update in several years and has issues on more recent version of Android. But it's not dead; I still use it daily… I'm just still using a Galaxy S6 running Android 7.0. If I get a new Android phone before switching to a Linux phone, development will start again.

Material shell is similar but not scrollable freely resizable, which is really a key difference.

Cardboard's lack of active maintenance may not be as much of an issue as PaperWM, because it's a full window manager, rather than an extension on top of Gnome. So, a slow development pace might just mean not getting any new features or bugfixes, whereas running an old version of gnome-shell that still supports PaperWM may become more difficult.

[derrix060]

Material Shell does have scrollable, the only difference is that the width is not freely resizable...

[magthe]

I started https://gitlab.com/magus/wf-scud after reading one of the cardboard author's blog posts. I've not fully made the switch myself yet but I'm increasing my wayfire usage steadily.

[hikhvar]

@smichel17 yes it may not be abandoned, however let's rephrase it. The maintainership is not in a healthy state. In this thread we have the voices of al ot of users. As with most open source projects there are more users than potential developers. Myself is a Javascript and Gnome Shell noob.

[juanxrv]

I love PaperWM but sad it's half dead

[smichel17]

I noticed from the network graph that @tadfisher, @YannikSc, and @Gelbana have all made changes towards Gnome 40/41 support in the last month in their own forks. Maybe we can coordinate a soft fork to make some progress until @hedning gets back?

[smichel17]

@olejorgenb What are your permissions on this repo and the @paperwm org? I'd like to be respectful that this is still @hedning's project, but at the same time, it would be most convenient if we didn't have to move far. If you have the right permissions, I was thinking something like creating a new repo under the same org, and adding @tadfisher, @YannikSc, and @Gelbana as collaborators there, if they are interested.

[KiaraGrouwstra]

@smichel17 in the event @olejorgenb has indeed been entrusted with the ability to accept PRs here, then might we not as well stay in this repo?

[smichel17]

I was envisioning giving all 3 of them push access, so they can merge each other's PRs without being dependent on @olejorgenb's availability, and I wouldn't want to do that on this repo without @hedning's permission. Also, I think it's a good idea to leave the master, develop, and next-release branches as they are, so @hedning can decide how to incorporate the updates. It may be possible to set something like that up on this repo, but I figured it would be easiest just to make a new repo and grant broad permissions (this one can still be used for issue tracking).

[KiaraGrouwstra]

perfect, thanks for clarifying!

[YannikSc]

Good, that I took a look into this issue, as I missed the GitHub mails. I just checked and noticed, that @Gelbana and I were doing sort-of the same, but luckily not completely the same. So I merged his changes into my fork for now, mostly because I'm using PaperWM daily and every fix is a good fix.

I wonder if there is a list of bugs focussed on GNOME 40? I already wrote all problems I found into a TODOS.md, which is fine when working alone, but for collaboration we could maybe create gh issues and label them with GNOME 4x?

[tadfisher]

I have a GTK 4 prefs UI written, and I'm currently cleaning up the keybindings page. Right now my code makes the extension compatible with Gnome 40+ only, but we could discuss maintaining compatibility with older shell versions. I'm happy to contribute in any way, including starting a new branch (preferably based on next-release as that's what my fork is based on).

[hikhvar]

As we can't manage to get write access to this repository, is it worth it to create a fork with all write access for those who want to contribute?

[Gelbana]

I have just been fixing small issues as I come across them since I still daily drive this extension (honestly don't know if it's possible to live without it on a 32:9 monitor). In line with @tadfisher, some of the changes made are not backwards compatible.

If any changes happen to be useful to the project, I am happy to contribute.

[cstich]

If we setup a (soft) fork, I'll help out as best as I can as well, which won't be a massive contribution given that I don't know JavaScript.

I was just wondering whether we need to maintain backwards compatibility at all. Everyone stuck on a version before Gnome 40 could just use PaperWM from this repo, no?

[michaelhthomas]

Just created an org with a new fork of the main repo (PaperWM-community/PaperWM), and invited several of you. Let me know if there's anyone else wanting to contribute, I'd be happy to add you on as well. Feel free to add all your existing changes @Gelbana, it's already working great for me!

[MikiVanousek]

So is the fork already compatible with gnome 40? If so, please update the read me and I will test it out.

[sammael-s1]

Animation on switching workspaces is broken when using multiple screen setup. It was mentioned already. However suggestion to disable animation in gnome-tweaks was... not entirely satisfying. Than I came across this extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1328/disable-workspace-switch-animation/ This made my life good again. Cheers

[jsravn]

There's a PR in the fork to fix workspace animations. Now to wait for the fork to merge the PRs ...

[gavr123456789]

So, can you write instructions for those who are not in the topic how to run paper wm in GNOME 41 now?

[cstich]

So, can you write instructions for those who are not in the topic how to run paper wm in GNOME 41 now?

Don't the instructions for GNOME 40 (see above) still work?

[gavr123456789]

Ye, for everybody who not familiar with all of this:
1) go https://github.com/PaperWM-community/PaperWM/tree/next-release and git clone / download
2) put folder to .local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/ 3) install.sh restart shell, turn on extension

Checked on GNOME 41.1 Arch
Everything works except the switch between desktops by win + page up/down
https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1328/disable-workspace-switch-animation/ didnt help

[jsravn]

All I needed was the vertical overview plugin to fix workspace switching. No other extensions necessary with the fork.

[magthe]

@gavr123456789 so next-release is better than develop at the moment?

[jsravn]

Yes, especially since the prefs window works.

[paven]

The prefs, do not work with my setup with next-release. Gnome 40.0.4, X11 Ubuntu. ____ / Patrik G

On Wed, 26 Jan 2022 at 12:12, James Ravn @.***> wrote:

Yes, especially since the prefs window works.

— Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/paperwm/PaperWM/issues/376#issuecomment-1022098215, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAAB5F6ZBIWFF2FPQEJVES3UX7JETANCNFSM4ZMOYV2Q . You are receiving this because you commented.Message ID: @.***>

[wraithm]

I'm running the https://github.com/PaperWM-community/PaperWM/tree/next-release version. I've noticed that a handful of keyboard shortcuts don't work in my current set up with GNOME 40. Things like Super-V (look at notifications) and Super-` don't behave as expected. When I disable paperwm, those shortcuts work. So, the new paperwm seems to be swallowing those keyboard shortcuts.

Also, how do I get my custom user.js shortcuts and such working?

[MikiVanousek]

Shortcuts don't work for me in vanilla gnome all the time. For example, right now, moving to the second desktop with super+2 stopped working. All other desktops (1..6) work fine. Sometimes different shortcuts don't work.

[MikiVanousek]

Ye, for everybody who not familiar with all of this:

1. go https://github.com/PaperWM-community/PaperWM/tree/next-release and git clone / download

2. put folder to .local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/

3. install.sh restart shell, turn on extension

Checked on GNOME 41.1 Arch Everything works except the switch between desktops by win + page up/down https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1328/disable-workspace-switch-animation/ didnt help

I followed the steps and ended up getting a version error.

[magthe]

I got the broken shortcuts back to working by going into the ordinary Gnome settings and aggressively turning off shortcuts there.

[jsravn]

Yeah there is some issue with shortcuts, I noticed this too. I fixed it I think by resetting shortcuts and toggling the extension off/on again. Doesn't help though the shortcut reset crashes in gnome 41.

[ccope]

I'm using (abusing?) this discussion thread to document issues I'm finding with the soft-fork under Ubuntu 22.04/GNOME 41/Wayland: https://github.com/PaperWM-community/PaperWM/discussions/20

[oguzserbetci]

@MikulasVanousek I got an error as well, but it was because popos-shell was activated. After I turned it off and restarted gnome shell PaperWM worked.

[smichel17]

In the fork, there is code which:

• Adds support for gnome 40 and 41, but breaks compatibility with gnome 38 or earlier
• Fixes bugs or adds features, and does not affect compatibility
• Adds support for gnome 42, but breaks compatibility with gnome 41 or earlier

However, much of this code is scattered across a bunch of branches and PRs. The task now is to merge it all together and bring it upstream here.

This issue is very long, and the code to address it already all exists in the master branch of the fork, so I think I am going to merge that first (disregarding any additional bugfixes or features not yet included there), close this issue, and we can continue the discussion of getting gnome 42 work merged here in #409. If there are any other problems that pop up, we can open new issues here to track them.