gnome3

1. software
2. desktop

When I don't want to feel like an exotic little snowflake that spends hours needlessly configuring his desktop environment, I go back to the default, which is usually GNOME. I work with the following configuration:

• 4 basic desktops, with Super-[1234] ("windows key") mapped to the 4 desktops (I used to have a 2x2 layout, but couldn't figure out how to do this in GNOME 3)
• install impatience to disable animations
• other gnome tweaks:
  • enable the Compose key (super-right)
  • alternatetab (to not group alt-tab by app, make sure to configure the plugin to show all workspaces)
  • applications menu
  • places status indicator
  • workrave display
  • focus follows mouse (slow, but works)
• consider material shell

I still have to figure out how to enable the nice shortcuts I have in my normal setup. In particular, I should bind the same keybindings to rofi. I found the keyboard navigation manual very useful to get familiar with the platform.

Finally, a big blocker is how to configure GPG agent so that it properly talks with my Yubikey, otherwise I can't talk to any SSH server. So far I figured out how to disable GNOME Keyring by doing this:

( cat /etc/xdg/autostart/gnome-keyring-ssh.desktop ; echo Hidden=true ) > ~/.config/autostart/gnome-keyring-ssh.desktop

It disables the gnome-keyring startup routine. Then GPG-agent starts supervised, but doesn't show up in the environment, so we fail. Apparently, the following shell snippet is supposed to fix that problem:

# Needed for GPG2 to bridge with ssh-agent
#export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/run/user/1000/gnupg/S.gpg-agent.ssh
#unset SSH_AGENT_PID
if [ "${gnupg_SSH_AUTH_SOCK_by:-0}" -ne $$ ]; then
    export SSH_AUTH_SOCK="$(gpgconf --list-dirs agent-ssh-socket)"
fi

export GPG_TTY="$(tty)"

# So annoying to need to do this every time
gpg-connect-agent updatestartuptty /bye > /dev/null

This is all so weird and broken and confusing that I found about ten different guides trying to tell people how to do this kind of stuff:

• John Hopkins university's McQueen Lab: Yubikey for SSH Authentication
• karlgrz: 2 Factor Authentication GPG & SSH keys with pass and Yubikey NEO
• Chris's Digital Realm: My Perfect GnuPG / SSH Agent Setup
• Simon Josefsson's blog: OpenPGP Smartcards and GNOME
• Arch wiki: GNOME Keyring
• lg's blog: YubiKey gpg/ssh: Great security but tricky install

Also: maybe try PaperWM to get tiling into GNOME.