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Ask HN: What GNOME Shell extensions do you use?

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Re: Ask HN: What GNOME Shell extensions do you use?

#12
post #6

none, and I do use gnome. to be honest, I'm not even sure where I'd get a shell extension, or what I'd want out of one. I tend to run apps in full screen and switch between virtual desktops.

You get them even via you package manager or e.g. from https://extensions.gnome.org/

What you can get out of one: e.g. caffeine, without it the "screensaver" will blacken the window, which I do not want..... You cannot disable soem features in window manager or apps. The workaour ist to use a shell extensions or sometimes called applet.

Re: Ask HN: What GNOME Shell extensions do you use?

#13
post #3

You'd probably get a more meaningful discussion if you had instead asked what desktop environment they use. Most Linux users abhor what Gnome has become.

I like XFCE a lot. It's really great especially if you're one who uses the browser for a lot of stuff, and don't care about Wayland.

I install arch from scratch. Arc dark gtk theme. XFCE. I just delete the dock and make the menu the inbuilt whisker menu so it looks like the windows ui which I am comfy with. Add key bindings for win+numpad for window snapping, add super key binding for start menu. Looks nice, very very fast.

None of it's inbuilt apps tho. I use the browser to open basically every file. The Google docs extension handles office files. Pdf, images, are opened natively obviously. VLC for media.

Re: Ask HN: What GNOME Shell extensions do you use?

#15
post #3

You'd probably get a more meaningful discussion if you had instead asked what desktop environment they use. Most Linux users abhor what Gnome has become.

Guess I'm an exception then. Gnome 3 had a slow and dumpy start but it's improving more and more now to me

Re: Ask HN: What GNOME Shell extensions do you use?

#17
post #3

You'd probably get a more meaningful discussion if you had instead asked what desktop environment they use. Most Linux users abhor what Gnome has become.

e.g. NixOS survey from last year. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2022-nix-survey-results/18983 has Gnome as highest with 259, followed by Plasma at 201. Though, prob'ly NixOS survey population isn't a good representation of wider Linux users. (xmonad got 108 on the same poll).

Here's this poll from r/fedora from last year. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fedora/comments/z5pt2z/what_is_your... which has Gnome at 2.4k to KDE's 963.

Re: Ask HN: What GNOME Shell extensions do you use?

#20
Clipboard history, Pop! Shell, and workspace scroller (scroll across the top bar to quickly go through workspaces), on NixOS.

I also set up dconf options so I always have 10 workspaces, not just one more than the number currently being used, which is a pretty bad default imo. Muscle memory works much better when you can quickly go to the workspace you associate with some program of your workflow, say, Win+8 for a music player, rather than having to adapt to whatever order you happen to open programs in on this reboot.

One extension that I find really clever is Tactile [0], but unfortunately it doesn't synergize very well with Pop shell. One day I'll switch to qtile and build a custom everything with both those ideas.

[0] https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4548/tactile/

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