Next Free Workspace (Meta/Win Logo + `) is not working

[bastomiadi]

you forgot to add this package : https://github.com/regolith-linux/i3-next-workspace

to

/usr/bin/

and don't forget to chmod +x /usr/bin/i3-next-workspace

[gardotd426]

That's not how it works.

i3-next-workspace is just an i3-ipc Python script that makes stuff a bit easier. However, I was never informed of it's adoption by Ken. We've been working on something other than Slack for us to communicate via regarding Regolith and its goal of becoming as distro-agnostic as possible. But yeah, it wasn't a part of the 1.6 release repo we were using at the time as far as I knew, and Arch doesn't actually do rolling releases of packages unless they are named as such, such as having -git, -beta, -nightly or -dev appended to the end. If it doesn't have any of that, then it's never, ever supposed to be a rolling package. Arch is a rolling release distribution. It is NOT a source-based distribution. You don't see them updating Mesa because some cool commit hit the master branch.

As an actual official member of the Regolith organization now (and I guess the lone "get and keep Regolith DE working on Arch Linux" person), I will tell you that Ken (the Regolith creator) had no earthly idea what he was doing when it came to organizing his work on Regolith Linux (the distro) in a way that would be conducive to anyone else ever using said work. What I mean is, there were never repositories with source code to compile pretty much any of the programs created for Regolith, period. There was no repository you could report bugs at, you couldn't file MRs, it was just a launchpad with a bunch of .debs.

After I got Regolith 1.4 ported completely to Arch with full functionality, and kept it maintained for a long period, and then someone expressed doing the same for Gentoo, and it snowballed a little, Ken started actually undertaking the monumental taslk of moving to a completely different development style and workflow, with a whole new list of concerns (like having to worry about Arch and Gentoo compatibility instead of just worrying about Ubuntu), all while completely reworking the way Regolith itself functioned from the ground up on a fundamental level. Like, yeah it's still "i3 plus gnome plus some custom stuff," but under the hood almost everything has changed.

Anyhow, i3-next-workspace is a small script that makes use of already existing functionality within i3. I do not actually consider that part of Regolith, if I'm being honest. There is no program to compile (like with i3xrocks or remontoire), there's no nest of config directories and files, like with basically everything Regolith uses. It's one little "i3 workspace switching script," of which there are about 1000 in the AUR:

That said. Since it's just a matter of cloning the repo and adding it to some pre-existing package (like regolith-i3-config or something), and literally nothing else, I'll go ahead and add it. I may even consider pushing a final 1.6 update just to throw it in there before I stop all updates to finish the gargantuan heap of bullshit that is moving the PKGBUILD from 1.6 over to 2.0. Once that tedium is over, then comes the real test, which is seeing whether everything still works, and all the new stuff works as it should. I don't expect any problems, but last time I said that, I ended up having to patch remontoire and like 3 rofi components of Regolith, because updates that'd hit Arch broke Regolith's config options.

I'm hoping to talk Ken into moving away completely from a "based on Ubuntu" approach for the desktop environment in the future, because it's very rare for DEs to do that, they usually are upstream from distributions. Honestly the only examples I can think of that build themselves around a certain distro and its libraries/software are Elementary's Pantheon, and MAYBE Mint's Cinnamon. Deepin definitely doesn't, because I've participated in a ton of bugtesting, bisecting, etc on Arch along with like dozens or hundreds of other Arch users and developers to help the Deepin Linux folks develop the latest major release of Deepin Desktop Environment.

Anyway, I'm rambling because I'm in a pretty annoying place having had 2.0 just drop with seemingly no warning, but that's because I can't stand Slack and never have it open, I'm assuming Ken told everyone there that it was coming. But now I have people filing bugs and commenting on the AUR pages and flagging the shit out of date when they don't realize that there is no "Regolith Desktop Environment" tarball that I can download and extract and that be it, to where all I'd have to do is change the version numbers and checksums, and that's it. Anyway, I'll make a commit later today adding your i3-next-workspace. 2.0 will be out ASAP, I can't really give a good timeline though because I could finish the PKGBUILD and find there's some stupid issue with regolith, gnome-session, i3, and other such bullshit, which has happened before. But we'll see.