I expected the aardvark to break a couple of things. They switched back from Unity to Gnome, so even more than usual, I feared the system might not even start.

Compared to that, things went quite smoothly. One problem I ran into is how Gnome devs apparently never used a dual screen setup, and thought it would be a good idea to only switch workspaces on the main screen, and keep the other screen static. Needless to say, that’s not how workspaces are supposed to work.

There is luckily a Gnome Shell extension to handle multiple screens. It seemed all shiny, except for the fact that it didn’t work. The thumbnail bar is off and the second screen still wouldn’t switch workspaces along the main one.

Updating the extension from git didn’t help either, so I figured it’s time to dive into dconf and try to figure out what’s wrong. Before I added the extension, I found a suggestion about turning off the org.gnome.shell.overrides.workspaces-only-on-primary key. That’s also something that the extension does automatically when installed.

But as I said, that didn’t work. I used dconf Editor to search for “workspace” and after a bunch of irrelevant and/or possibly not even functional keys I found that org.gnome.mutter has a workspaces-only-on-primary key too – and that wasn’t touched by the extension. Turning it off actually did the trick and I now have workspaces working “properly”.

Though the thumnail slider of the extension is still positioned wrong, but at least it works.