This past Monday morning was great; I came back to work after an extended vacation and I installed Linux Mint 12 on my T510.

I am a heavy user of workspaces to keep my work and my mind organized. I like knowing that Thunderbird is a quick (CTRL+ALT+RIGHT)*2 away but that it will not distract me while in a coffee-induced ADHD-like state. For reasons like this, I feel offended and alienated by changes to my workspaces! I felt like I was being asked to lose functionality for the sake of new users and the tablet experience.

Aside from this and a couple of small things, I was pretty happy with the direction that Gnome 3 was headed in.

Linux Mint 12 and MGSE are what I was hoping for when I wasn’t thrilled about some aspects of Gnome-Shell. I have my window list back, I don’t have to ALT-TILDE through application windows, and my calendar is back where it should be.

Multiple Monitors#

I have my T510 docked at work and connected to my dual monitors. My work load has been relatively light over the past week so I have been adjusting to having a single static workspace on the right monitor with dynamic workspaces on the left and it has been tolerable. I feel that it enforces a single-workspace desktop experience, though, which I know will not work for me during a heavy work load. After a bit of Googleing, I found this awesome blog post that talked about a hidden GConf key:

Fix Dual Monitors in Gnome 3 aka My Workspaces are Broken

I am thrilled to have workspaces extended to my second monitor. Gnome-Shell does have a bit of trouble offering a window preview in the dashboard view.

A couple weeks later…#

I have switched back to the default Gnome 3.2 behaviour of having dynamic workspaces on my left monitor and a static workspace to the right. I have done so because of the strange behaviour of the Gnome-shell dashboard view when you have dynamic workspaces on your secondary monitor.

It seems that the dashboard view is not aware that a second monitor can have dynamic workspaces and will pull in all of the windows that exist across all workspaces on that secondary monitor when bringing up the dashboard. This is rather cool, and could maybe be a feature at some point. The shell will switch to a different desktop if you do click on a window that exists in a different workspace, at least. The behaviour is strange and inconsistent right now, though.