Significant progress update on UI scaling to enable Gnome 42 on the PinePhone Pro.
How this was achieved:
Gnome Extensions:
* App Grid Tweaks (Set max Columns to 4, row count as 5 and Icon size to 64px).*NOTE* This extension required extension validation to be disabled and a file hack to force it to always load the max column count as '4' and row count as '5'.
* Dock from Dash (Not to be confused with 'Dash to Dock' as that is presently broken in Gnome 42).
* Just Perfection (Multiple tweaks including hiding unnecessary items in top bar)
* Maximize To Workspace (Automatically moves new windows to their own workspaces)
* Maximized by default (Launches app in maximized state to utilize multiple workspaces more effectively)
Wayland Fractional Scaling @150%, run the following command:
NOTES:
* Gnome 42 has support for 3 finger gestures to switch between workspaces and to pull the app list (and dock) up on screen. Although single finger/thumb screen edge gestures may be more effective than 3 finger gestures, this is a good starting point to making Gnome more usable on the PinePhone devices.
* Most Gnome-Core apps scale pretty well on the PinePhone Pro, although there are a couple of exceptions, one example exception is the new GTK4 Text Editor application, at 150% scaling on the PPP, the app is just ever so slightly too wide and so the app doesn't support maximized window mode and requires a little dragging from left to right (and vice versa) when trying to read the last few characters in a word.
* The power button to turn the screen off works in 'PostMarket OS', but not in Manjaro which I previously tried, and so screen on/off capabilities are now there in this distro build, although PMOS has other issues on this installation such as lack of audio output.
* With the present configuration on the PinePhone Pro, I found that with the screen off for 7 hours the battery only went down by 18%, although when the screen is on it was typically going down by about 1% for every 1 to 3 minutes. So screen on battery can be rather poor, but screen off battery life is not too bad.
* The notification layout is still cut off when you expand the clocks calendar/notification popup, to fix this we would require the extension 'Notification centre' to be updated to work with Gnome 42 and to separate the Notification UI from the clock/calendar popup.
*Edit*
Updated the configuration a little adding Blur My Shell and changing the App Grid layout to fit a 4x5 grid on there.
How this was achieved:
Gnome Extensions:
* App Grid Tweaks (Set max Columns to 4, row count as 5 and Icon size to 64px).*NOTE* This extension required extension validation to be disabled and a file hack to force it to always load the max column count as '4' and row count as '5'.
* Dock from Dash (Not to be confused with 'Dash to Dock' as that is presently broken in Gnome 42).
* Just Perfection (Multiple tweaks including hiding unnecessary items in top bar)
* Maximize To Workspace (Automatically moves new windows to their own workspaces)
* Maximized by default (Launches app in maximized state to utilize multiple workspaces more effectively)
Wayland Fractional Scaling @150%, run the following command:
Code:
gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"
NOTES:
* Gnome 42 has support for 3 finger gestures to switch between workspaces and to pull the app list (and dock) up on screen. Although single finger/thumb screen edge gestures may be more effective than 3 finger gestures, this is a good starting point to making Gnome more usable on the PinePhone devices.
* Most Gnome-Core apps scale pretty well on the PinePhone Pro, although there are a couple of exceptions, one example exception is the new GTK4 Text Editor application, at 150% scaling on the PPP, the app is just ever so slightly too wide and so the app doesn't support maximized window mode and requires a little dragging from left to right (and vice versa) when trying to read the last few characters in a word.
* The power button to turn the screen off works in 'PostMarket OS', but not in Manjaro which I previously tried, and so screen on/off capabilities are now there in this distro build, although PMOS has other issues on this installation such as lack of audio output.
* With the present configuration on the PinePhone Pro, I found that with the screen off for 7 hours the battery only went down by 18%, although when the screen is on it was typically going down by about 1% for every 1 to 3 minutes. So screen on battery can be rather poor, but screen off battery life is not too bad.
* The notification layout is still cut off when you expand the clocks calendar/notification popup, to fix this we would require the extension 'Notification centre' to be updated to work with Gnome 42 and to separate the Notification UI from the clock/calendar popup.
*Edit*
Updated the configuration a little adding Blur My Shell and changing the App Grid layout to fit a 4x5 grid on there.