Hello,

I am trying to make my Kali Linux virtual machines behave similarly to my Pop!_OS system. I am looking for the tiling desktop, workspaces, shortcuts, etc.

I installed Kali into a VM and made sure to install the GNOME desktop using the GDM3 window manager. I then followed these instructions, using the Ubuntu portion of the instructions - https://support.system76.com/articles/pop-shell/

I do have the option of turning on the tiling but the workspaces and the shortcuts functionality does not all appear to be there.

Can anyone help point me down the path of getting the full Pop!_OS desktop functionality on a Kali Linux build?

Thanks!

  • @barfplanetEnglish
    6•1 year ago

    The Pop Shell extension includes tiling but not the keyboard shortcuts, gestures, or anything involving workspaces.

    Your options to get the full experience would be to manually configure all of those things. It would be far easier to start with Pop_os and add the packages from Kali that you want than to go the other way.

    • @TheAnalogKidOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      That is what I feared / thought. I was thinking about doing it the Pop!_OS to Kali direction but there are challenges there too.

      Kali does a lot of very unique configurations for compatibility like still having Python 2 for backwards compatibility with the huge number of exploit scripts that were written in Python 2.

      I love the idea of having the Pop!_OS and the tiling but not sure that I want to spend the time and endure the pain of making it all work. I tried playing with i3 and liked that too but there were some issues that became show stoppers.

      Thanks for the reply!

      • @PlasticExistenceEnglish
        3•1 year ago

        I ran into a bunch of show stoppers when I first tried Linux in the late 90s. Just configuring the right settings to your monitor was a bit daunting to a newbie - and if you did it wrong you could literally fry your monitor!

        Little by little I kept learning how to do things in Linux instead of in Windows. One day I uninstalled Windows altogether (no more dual boot) and decided that I was going to avoid using Windows at all costs so that I could truly learn to live in Linux full time.

        That was 15 years ago, and I’ve been quite happy since. Windows has never been my personal OS since (I still had to work with it for my jobs, naturally).

        Kali isn’t meant to be a daily driver. I think you’ll have a better time learning how to add those tools to a general purpose Linux distro. Doing that will teach you some of the basics on how to configure your OS to your liking while having lots of little things already configured for usability.

        Kali can be run within a virtual machine too if you want to avoid some of that setup work in getting the tools installed to a different distro.

  • Michael Murphy (S76)MEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    You have to install all of the cosmic extensions and the Pop session. However, extensions are sensitive to the version of GNOME you’re using so you need the master_jammy branch of each extension for GNOME 42.

    • @TheAnalogKidOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Thanks! This sounds promising but there is not much there in the way of … hey … here is what you do with this stuff.

      /usr … do I just copy the contents into the /usr directory?

      /debian … do not know what to do with this

      Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

      Thanks!

      • Michael Murphy (S76)MEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        These repos have makefiles so it’s make && sudo make install after using git to clone the repo URLs. You can reference build dependencies in debian/control. You can call dpkg-buildpackage -b to build a debian package if you’d rather that then installing with make directly.