Fullscreen Gaming in Gnome

I’ve been mostly enjoying doing my gaming in Fedora Linux, but the last couple of versions have been mildly irritating, in that some games were unable to gain fullscreen: Even when I told the game to open in fullscreen mode, the Gnome menubar insisted on remaining on-screen, and pushed the game and its content down by an amount of pixels corresponding to its height.

This affected X-Plane 12, which didn’t surprise me a lot since it’s not exactly a mass-marked game. But it also affected Counter Strike 2, which really did surprise me as it’s basically Valves current flagship product.

To make a long story short, I accidentally stumbled over, not a solution, but a workaround for this issue. It turns out that Gnome lets you assign a keyboard shortcut to force the current window into fullscreen mode.

Open the Settings app, select Keyboard, scroll down to Keyboard Shortcuts and select View and Customize Shortcuts. Under Windows, find Toggle fullscreen mode and click it. This lets you select the key combination to activate the shortcut. I selected Shift+Super+F for it, which I don’t think should be likely to collide with anything I regularly do in any games.

Now I’ll be able to do my gaming with a minimum of paper cuts until somebody fixes the underlying problem.