Arch Linux

russose

Member

Registered: 2013-08-09

Posts: 20

[gnome3] Disable overview on the second monitor

Hello,
I have two monitors and I am often in this situation: I work in gnome on the first monitor and my children watch movie on the second monitor (in full screen). The issue is that when I am working, I often switch apps from the "overview" and the overview is active for my monitor but also for the second monitor with that movie app (vlc/Kodi) are in full screen.
Is there a way to disable the "overview" on the second monitor?
Thanks for the help,
Salvatore

regexwizard

Member

Registered: 2025-11-10

Posts: 1

Re: [gnome3] Disable overview on the second monitor

I know it's an old thread. But this little problem makes it impossible to use GNOME for me.

I will quote one of the users:

Scenario 1: I’m watching a video (full screen) on my secondary monitor while I’m doing other stuff on my primary monitor. When I click Activities or do the three-finger touchpad gesture to switch to another application, the video in the other monitor will zoom out.

Scenario 2: I'm screen-sharing a presentation shown on my secondary monitor. The presentation itself is in fullscreen. However, trying to switch/run another application via the Activities Overview requires the shared presentation to be zoomed-out which could be quite distracting to viewers I'm presenting to.

Is it possible to disable this behavior? I don't find this very intuitive and honestly, it's quite annoying.

There are numerous posts about this on the web, but not a single solution.
So if you want to use apps on a secondary screen without constantly triggering activity overview on it,
you need to switch from GNOME to something else.

Here the collection of posts that I found that describe the same problem:

• https://discourse.gnome.org/t/is-there- … play/18684

• https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-sh … ssues/8379

• https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments … on_second/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments … y_monitor/

Last edited by regexwizard (2025-11-10 15:37:11)

WorMzy

Administrator

From: Scotland

Registered: 2010-06-16

Posts: 13,111

Website

Re: [gnome3] Disable overview on the second monitor

Please don't necrobump.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Genera … bumping%22

Closing.

---

Sakura:-
Mobo: MSI MAG X570S TORPEDO MAX // Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X @4.9GHz // GFX: AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT // RAM: 32GB (4x 8GB) Corsair DDR4 (@ 3000MHz) // Storage: 1x 3TB HDD, 6x 1TB SSD, 2x 120GB SSD, 1x 275GB M2 SSD

Making lemonade from lemons since 2015.