GNOME 44 recently got released. Because Debian Bookworm is undergoing a freeze, GNOME 44 is not yet available in Debian Unstable. It’s very similar to the GNOME 40 situation 2 years ago. While the wait for the freeze to be over can take a long time, Debian already has (most) of the updated pacakges in the experimental, and we can update to GNOME 44 through it:
A recent change introduced in GNU coreutils changed the default dircolors for backup files to make them less conspicuous. However, despite having stated that it works on dark backgrounds, this change made it impossible to see backup files such as .tar, .swp, .bak, .old when using the dark variant of the Solarized color scheme of the terminal. It can be seen in the following screenshots:
Solarized darkSolarized light
To fix it, we’ll override the colors by creating ~/.dircolors file:
This will set the color of backup files to black, which makes them not stand out, but still readable.
This is the bash function I used to pretty-print all ls colors:
( # Run in a subshell so it won't crash current color settings
dircolors -b >/dev/null
IFS=:
for ls_color in ${LS_COLORS[@]}; do # For all colors
color=${ls_color##*=}
ext=${ls_color%%=*}
echo -en "\E[${color}m${ext}\E[0m " # echo color and extension
done
echo
)
If your LibreOffice UI looks ugly and not following your GNOME theme, you might be missing a package.
Ugly LibreOffice theme
After installing the libreoffice-gnome package (which also pulled the libreoffice-gtk3 package), LibreOffice looked much better and the UI was properly themed.
Since GNOME 40 the keyboard layout indicator doesn’t work if the keyboard is switched using a key combination defined in GNOME Tweaks. The indicator does work for key combinations defined through GNOME Setting’s Keyboard Shortcut settings. However, GNOME Settings doesn’t allow one to set Alt+Shift as the key combination layout switching, as it seems to require at least one non-modifier key in every shortcut. This limitation only exists in GNOME Settings GUI and you can work around it by defining the shortcut using gsettings:
$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-input-source "['<Shift>Alt_L']"
$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.keybindings switch-input-source-backward "['<Alt>Shift_L']"
These are the steps I took to install (most of) GNOME 40 Debian Unstable:
$ sudo apt install -t experimental gnome-shell gjs mutter gnome-control-center gnome-desktop3-data
$ sudo apt-mark auto gjs mutter
Failing to install gjs 1.68 from experimental will result in white or blue desktop backgrounds regardless of the wallpaper you choose. This bug was reported in Arch.
Most of GNOME 40 functionality should now work, including the updated activities overview.
What doesn’t work? Settings->About still display GNOME’s version as 3.38. I suspect it’s because gnome-session is still at 3.38.
Update 2021-08-24: I upgraded to gnome-session 40.1.1 and it didn’t solve the version string issue.
Update 2021-08-31: Following a comment by Jeremy, I installed gnome-desktop3-data from experimental and it fixed the version string issue.
It looks like digiKam installed on a default Gnome environment has missing icons. For example the "pick" icons (the little flags for Rejected/Pending/Accepted) are missing. The reason is that the default Gnome icon pack, Adwaita is missing some of the icons used by digiKam.
The solution is to install the Breeze icon theme and then select it in digiKam:
$ sudo apt install breeze-icon-theme
and then in digikam Settings -> Configure digiKam -> Miscellaneous -> Appearance -> Icon theme and select "Breeze". Actually you can leave it as "Use Icon Theme From System" and it will use Adwaita and only fall back to Breeze for missing icons. However, I do find it more pleasant to have a consistent icon theme.
Zoom has a native Linux client which supports screen sharing in Wayland, at least on some platforms. Today when I tried to start a Share Screen I encountered the following error:
Error when trying to start Share Screen
Can not start share, we only support Wayland on GNOME with Ubuntu 17 and above, Fedora 25 and above, Debian 9 and above, CentOS 8 and above, OpenSUSE Leap 15 and above, Oracle Linux 8 and above, Arch Linux, AnterGos, Manjaro. If your OS is not on the list, please use x11 instead.
The feature works for me when I’m using Debian Stable (Buster), and also worked for the short while I’ve used Debian Testing (Bullseye). So, I guessed that the feature is broken due to wrong OS version detection. The fix is easy: Remove /etc/os-release (which is by default a symlink to /usr/lib/os-release) and append to the original contents the following lines:
When I first encountered the error, I guessed Zoom doesn’t actually attempt the Share Screen, but relies on a pre-configured list of supported distros and (minimal) versions. It worked for me with Debian Stable (10) and Testing (11), but what version number is Unstable? Debian Unstable doesn’t have a version number associated with it, so it must be the problem.
A quick strace revealed how Zoom retrieves the current distro name and version:
As you can see Zoom reads (and probably later parses) the entire /etc/os-release file. This file contains identification data for the current running distro including name and version. Because Debian Sid doesn’t have the version variables set, Zoom erroneously misinterpret it as an old version instead of the newest. Thus, it refuses to enable the Share Screen feature. Adding the relevant version variables solves this issue.
After installing Debian Jessie with Gnome 3.14, I noticed an annoying bug: When I tried to switch windows using Alt+Tab it worked as it should, but when I tried to switch in reverse order, using Alt+shit+Tab it did not work. I quickly figured out that the problem lies in the frequently used shortcut, Alt+Shift for switching keyboard layouts. Indeed, when I tried cycling through windows, I switched keyboard layouts instead.
The gist of the solution was found after some searching in Stack Exchange albeit it needs some adjustment for newer version of Gnome: Start the Gnome’s Tweak Tool and select Typing from the Tweaks menu. Under “Miscellaneous compatibility options” select “Shift cancels Caps Lock”.
This fixed the issue for me, without any side-effects. I don’t need to use Shift-Alt instead of Alt-Shift as suggested in the original solution and neither the Shift key cancels the Caps Lock as may be suggested by this option.
Update 2020-06-08: In Gnome 3.36 the relevant setting appears under Keyboard & Mouse -> Additional Layout Options -> Miscellaneous compatibility options.
