Is someone out there willing to pick the Pop! Shell project?

The Water Cooler
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Hello there!

One thing from Pop!_OS that I love to use in those serious multitasking moments my computer allows it the Pop! Shell window stackig feature. It is available on RPM Fusion for Fedora and they have a GitHub for other Gnome desktops.

However, since System76 is currently working on their own COSMIC Desktop Environment, support for the Pop! Shell will drop. According to Jeremy Soller, lead of the Pop!_OS team at the company, it will only have support for up-to Gnome 42 (The one used on Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS).

So, since I’m not from a technical background (I’m a sociologist/journalist), I write these lines as a call, a campaign for someone here, or in the Gnome community, to pick-up the project. It would be great as an official Gnome extension if you ask me.

Anyone? Please? :grin:

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I am using Pop! Shell in Fedora 38, It still works, for now.

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So am I… and I love how it works. And I would be bad if if breaks for future verison of Gnome and there’s no one to fix or improve upon it.

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Hi Juan, not in a position to help with this but I would like to thank you for posting this. Hopefully someone picks this up but I was unaware of the change/plan to drop gnome support.

I am yet to actually give pop shell a go (planning on doing so next week); but now that I know it is being dropped I am slightly apprehensive to do so.

I did read somewhere that they plan on supporting other operating systems with cosmic; which despite using gnome since… Well… Since I started using Linux. I don’t think I would be adversed to using.

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Thought I would update you/this thread with what I have been playing with for the last few weeks/months.

This thread/playing around with the popOS window manager threw me down a bit of a rabbit hole which has (for now) ended up with me using nixOS on my workstation… I won’t go into details about that other than I would suggest anyone reading to try out the nix package manager with home manager (runs great on fedora).

So back to the topic at hand; tiling windows in gnome. I had set up the pop window manager and was happy with it but decided to give other WMs a go to see how they differ and I quickly realised that while popwm is great it simply does not hold its own against more dedicated tiling window managers. I can now see why popOS have decided to build their own WM.

I mainly tried sway and Hyprland out as I wanted to stay with a Wayland WM. Once Hyprland has been set up properly it is truly amazing I suggest you give it a go too.

I do miss a lot of things from gnome though, I have got most of the gtk apps ported over into Hyprland but I do miss gnome as it ‘just works’…
I have just read this blog post, and I think it may be of interest to you!

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