One of the most frustrating thing about #Asahi #Linux: #GNOME is so *incredibly* close to working perfectly witch a notch. Literally all you need to do is to increase the size of the top bar size a bit and move the calendar/notifications menu to the right and it's perfect.

But GNOME doesn't have those options, you have to use extensions. And changing the top bar size from an extension is buggy and breaks in weird ways after suspend.

I actually started planning a blog post about how well GNOME can work with a notch because its design happens to be an almost perfect match already. I stopped when I started having this issue.

I tried finding ways to work around it. IIRC, if I modified the bar height through changing the default theme's CSS, it would work fine. But the default theme's CSS file is bundled in a .gresource file, and it gets overwritten when GNOME updates, so it wasn't practical.

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@mort this feels like it could be upstreamed. We would need a way to know if a specific display has insets/notches/punch hole cameras, which realistically we’ll need for mobile devices anyway. Once we have a way to define that, we could have Shell avoid drawing in that region.

Maybe we can check in with @agx wrt what Phosh is doing and if we can work on getting that upstream in Shell?

@cassidy @mort When running just add the notch info to and you're done.

For fullscreen apps this needs Wayland protocol support. This is work in progress (but the compositor already uses the same info).

A gnome-shell extension could just pick up the same info.

See phosh.mobi/posts/notch-support

@agx @cassidy Some sort of wayland protocol would be needed for truly fullscreen apps which want to draw around the notch, yeah. But a pretty good alternative would be to lie about the screen dimensions to the wayland client and make it think only the part below the notch/top bar exists, right? I believe that's what macOS does most of the time.

@mort @agx @cassidy Do you know if the notch info can be expressed in the device tree so there's a canonical place to look it up?

@agx @mort @cassidy Thanks! @cas do you know if there was any movement on this? The mentioned issue that the DT is not a "userspace configuration store" sounds a bit dubious to me. I mean - nowadays we use it for stuff like camera orientation which is also only useful for userspace.

@rmader @mort @cassidy @cas
whatever (hopefully) ends up in the kernel we need a way to provide the information via userspace too for
- overrides / non dt-devices
- tests (where you e.g. want to check phosh's layouting for different notch positions)

That's why it ended up in gmobile (gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/g). If it comes from DT or viia drm properties too we'll pick it up there as well for compositors and shells to make use of it.

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