GNOME Extensions: Spicing Up the Desktop Experience

GNOME 3 debuted with much hoopla, a new UI, as well as a complete overhaul of the toolkit and codebase. It is aimed at bridging the gap between the ‘medieval’ PC industry and the growing tablet market with a multi-pronged approach. However, responses have been lukewarm, making it a tough time enticing users to adopt the new interface. Besides, the lack of many pre-requisite features makes for an unsatisfactory user experience. Another major let-down was the deprecated APIs, which made many applications, widgets and fancy add-ons obsolete.

To tackle these issues, the GNOME team presented us with GNOME extensions—small add-ons that let users get an experience similar (if not better) to competing desktops, and even its older avatar. So let’s jump in for a quick look at these extensions and evaluate their performance compared to the bells and whistles offered by the competition.

Compatibility with GNOME 3.x forks: Ever since the GNOME 3.x release, there’s been a huge uproar in the distro community about the revamped desktop. With missing features and a performance hit, most distros are either not including GNOME 3.x, or forking the release and re-crafting it. Cinnamon (of Linux Mint fame) is one of the most popular forks of GNOME Shell, and tries to bridge the gap between the ever-loved GNOME 2.x while adding many new enhancements to the shell. The main disadvantage of using forks like Cinnamon or even Ubuntu Unity is it prevents you using the extensions from the GNOME extensions site. HowHYHU, LI you DUH OuFNy, you FDn sWLOO finG WKH HxWHnsLon Ln your package manager or a third-party PPA. Most popular extensions are available and should be good to go even if you use unsupported versions.

Cinnamon extensions: The Mint developers have gone one step ahead by not only forking the usual GNOME shell, but by providing users with arrays of extensions that will augment your user experience. To install Cinnamon extensions, simply install the extension from https:// extensions.gnome.org/ and copy the extension to ~/,local/ share/cinnamon/extensions.

Forks aside, the major problem with GNOME extensions is that to install most of them, the system must be running the latest iteration of GNOME, else the GNOME extension website will simply not let you install the extension. This is a serious let-down and developers should come up with a solution. Even a new point release will bar you from installing the extensions.

Installing extensions: Since GNOME Shell and