triston-notes/Cards/dev/Installing Gnome On Arch Linux.md

Installing Gnome On Arch Linux

Installation

Two package groups are available:

• gnome contains the base GNOME desktop and the well-integrated core applications;
• gnome-extra contains further GNOME applications, including an email client, an IRC client, GNOME Tweaks, a set of games and development tools. Note that this group builds on the gnome group.

The base desktop consists of GNOME Shell, a plugin for the Mutter window manager. It can be installed separately with gnome-shell.

[!NOTE] mutter acts as a composite manager for the desktop, employing hardware graphics acceleration to provide effects aimed at reducing screen clutter. The GNOME session manager automatically detects if your video driver is capable of running GNOME Shell and if not, falls back to software rendering using llvmpipe.

Unstable releases can also be used, see Official repositories#gnome-unstable.

Starting

GNOME can be started either graphically with a display manager or manually from the console (some features may be missing). The display manager included in gnome is GDM.

Note: Support for screen locking (and more) in GNOME is provided by GDM. If GNOME is not started with GDM, another screen locker may be used. See List of applications/Security#Screen lockers.

Graphically

If you installed the gnome group and want GNOME to start automatically on next boot, enable gdm.service. You can then select the desired session: GNOME, GNOME Classic (only displayed if gnome-shell-extensions is installed), or GNOME on Xorg from the display manager's session menu. Wayland sessions can be enabled/disabled in the GDM config.

If you prefer to start GNOME right away, thereby avoiding a reboot, start the aforementioned gdm.service from a graphically unoccupied tty instead.

Manually

Xorg sessions

i dont rreally care about this

Wayland sessions

The factual accuracy of this article or section is disputed.

Reason: Executing gnome-session via dbus may cause issues or not work at all. Some issues include the inability to start Chrome/Chromium and the lack of a sound device. Running gnome-session directly may work better. (Discuss in Talk:GNOME#Manually start a Wayland session)

Note: An X server is still necessary to run applications that have not yet been ported to Wayland, see Wayland#Xwayland for details. Applications using certain graphics libraries, such as Qt, can be forced to use Wayland by setting environment variables. See Wayland#GUI libraries for more information.

Manually starting a Wayland session is possible with:

$ XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland dbus-run-session gnome-session

Running gnome-shell --wayland directly is not recommended, because it lacks session management.

Note that manual invocation of Gnome does not require gdm (consequently also the accompanying gdm.service) at all and is thus also accessible for users with a (possibly very) minimal installation of Gnome composing of a selected few packages included in the more inclusive gnome group in accordance to personal preference.

To start on login to tty1, add the previous line of code to your .bash_profile. Firefox and QT applications do not respect XDG_SESSION_TYPE, so add variables for them as well:

if ; then MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland exec dbus-run-session gnome-session fi

GNOME applications in Wayland

When the GNOME session is used, GNOME applications will be run using Wayland. For debugging cases, https://docs.gtk.org/gtk3/running.html and https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/running.html list options and environment variables.

Navigation

To learn how to use the GNOME shell effectively, read the GNOME Shell Cheat Sheet; it highlights GNOME shell features and keyboard shortcuts. Features include task switching, keyboard use, window control, the panel, overview mode, and more. A few of the shortcuts are:

• Super+m: show notification list
• Super+a: show application grid
• Alt+Tab: cycle active applications
• Alt+` (the key above Tab on US keyboard layouts): cycle windows of the application in the foreground
• Alt+F2, then enter r or restart: restart the shell in case of graphical shell problems (only in X/legacy mode, not in Wayland mode).

See /Tips and tricks#Navigation for changes to the default configuration making the window-switching resemble that of Windows.

See Keyboard navigation for more shortcuts.

Gnome Integration with Arch

I'd like to add this section to main Gnome page.

Gnome Software with Arch Repositories

Install the gnome-software-packagekit-plugin package. Package provides access to software available in Arch Linux repositories.

Gnome Settings Networking Support

Install the networkmanager package.

This means that if you use other way of managing network it most likely has to be disabled.

Gnome Tweaks 45 update

Latest comment: 15 October1 comment1 person in discussion

In the Do_not_suspend_when_laptop_lid_is_closed section, the gnome tweaks option does not seem to be found in GNOME 45. Misaka 0x34ca (talk) 13:56, 15 October 2023 (UTC)Reply