It’s an endless curse. KDE enthusiasts are trimming down features to have something clear and usable, Gnome users are adding features through extensions while Cinnamon users just get things done.
I’m not part of any DE religious group, I like to use what my distro is coming with, so it’s more a device thing for me. However, for my work laptop, I’ve been using Gnome for a while now, I really like how it just disappears from my screen, leaving only a small black bar at the top with all the information I need.
With that said, I’m only human, and I had to rice up my Gnome installation, at least a little bit. These are my most used extensions, with emphasis on less known ones.
Run or raise
Launch or focus the window or define custom shortcuts in a text file
This one became a must-have. Since I switched to Wayland, my beloved Yakuake was acting very weirdly. Being half-sized, cropped, on the wrong screen and such. I tried to replace it with many other apps, extensions and even tried custom code, but nothing quite worked. Until this extension.
Using it with konsole to mimic Yakuake, with “Minimize when unfocusing” toggled, and F4,konsole,, added to the conf (or any F* keys really)
Bluetooth Battery Meter
A GNOME extension that displays indicator icons in the system tray, acting as a meter for Bluetooth device battery levels. It also provides detailed battery information via icons and text in the Bluetooth quick settings menu
Other apps in my workflow:
- The known and beloved “AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support”
- Clipboard History
- Dash to Dock
- Emoji Copy
- GNOME Fuzzy App Search
- GSConnect
- Keep awake!
- No overview at start-up
- Notification Timeout
- Tiling Shell
- Vitals
- Window Is Ready - Notification Remover
To minimize my grief of dead extensions when upgrading major Gnome versions, I’m often trying to reduce this list as much as possible.
Cover picture by Da Na: https://www.pexels.com/photo/charmant-nain-de-jardin-dans-un-ecrin-de-verdure-33348308/