GNOME shell suddenly only has two virtual desktops?

[stuaxo (Stuart Axon)]

Hi,
Apologies if this is the wrong place to ask.
Up until earlier today I could have an arbitrary amount of desktops in GNOME shell, now I seem to be stuck with two and can’t create more by just going further right.

Any idea where the setting for this lives (in the GUI and / or dconf) ?

I’m on Ubunutu 22.04 amd64, and things were working until the last reboot (due to the suspend / resume not being fully supported, I have to reboot with SysReq-REISUB, many times a day, so it’s possible something got corrupted).

I tried disabling all extensions and this still seems to be the case.

[skeller (Sebastian Keller)]

What is the output of gsettings get org.gnome.mutter dynamic-workspaces?

[stuaxo (Stuart Axon)]

gsettings get org.gnome.mutter dynamic-workspaces
true

Weirdly though in dconf Editor I can’t see that setting

[stuaxo (Stuart Axon)]

Using gsettings, I set it to false then true again, and now it is set to 4 static workspaces instead of two, which is a little better.

[skeller (Sebastian Keller)]

Why is the mutter gsettings schema missing in this screenshot? Does sudo glib-compile-schemas /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas help?

[fmuellner (Florian Müllner)]

Have you tried a “pure” GNOME session without extensions (including the ones that are preinstalled by Ubuntu)?

I’m asking because

$ gsettings get org.gnome.mutter dynamic-workspaces
true

is as expected, so maybe it’s an extension that interferes with the dynamic workspace handing.

[fmuellner (Florian Müllner)]

@stuaxo

Weirdly though in dconf Editor I can’t see that setting

Did you maybe install it as a flatpak or snap? dconf-editor will not detect schemas in the host’s /usr if that’s not available in the sandbox as /usr; at least for flatpak, that is not the case.

dconf-editor can still access the dconf database, but that only contains entries that have been changed, so without the schemas, it won’t show any settings that are at their default value.

[stuaxo (Stuart Axon)]

I’ll check what I installed it with, it seems a weird thing to make available as snap or flatpak if that’s the result though

I rebooted and the same thing happened again, I was able to do the same thing with gsettings and end up with 4 desktops.

Have rebooted since and am back to two.

[fmuellner (Florian Müllner)]

@stuaxo

it seems a weird thing to make available as snap or flatpak if that’s the result though

Just to clarify: That would explain why dconf-editor reports the schema as missing, not why dynamic workspaces stopped working for you.