Improve visuals of some Gnome actions to work better with PaperWM colored space backgrounds

[rodrigogonegit]

Describe the bug With the option "Use default GNOME shell background" disabled, switching to a different workspace via the Gnome shortcuts makes the solid background be replaced by my custom background image. Opening the Overview menu also triggers the same bug.

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Disable "Use default GNOME shell background"
2. Press the Super key to open the Overview
3. OR Switch to a different worksapce using the gnome keybindings (in my case, it's super key + 1/2/3/4/5/6)

Expected behavior I'd expect the solid background PaperWM sets to remain all the time.

Screenshots Video

System information: Please execute ./gather-system-info.sh in you PaperWM clone and paste the output below.

➜  PaperWM git:(release) bash gather-system-info.sh 
Please include this information in your bug report on GitHub!
Distribution: Fedora Linux
GNOME Shell 45.1
Display server: Wayland
PaperWM branch/tag: release
PaperWM commit: 4ee4d466047972636d7a7dbb3b943f6598fa4370
Enabled extensions:
- [email protected]
- just-perfection-desktop@just-perfection
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- [email protected]

Additional context Just found about PaperWM and this is absolutely amazing. Awesome work, thank you!

[jtaala]

Hey Rodrigo,

PaperWM spaces are separate and independent of gnome workspaces and use different concepts (and serve several purposes, including masking windows too far off screen since mutter doesn't allow windows that far offscreen).

In any case, this isn't a bug and not something we can fix entirely - for gnome specific actions (e.g. overview) the space overview simply hides (gnome overview hides things here) the space actors (Clutter.actor).

Likewise, for gnome workspace switching (a gnome action) - we provide PaperWM's version of switching (e.g. PaperWM vertical switching) which is intended to be used instead of gnome's version. In other words, gnome workspace switching is not directly within our control (and hence we provide PaperWM switching).

I'll change this to an enhancement in case someone wants to work on changing or overriding gnome specific animations to work better with PaperWM - but it's not something I'd work on.