Mike Stone

Mostly The Lonely Howls Of Mike Baying His Ideological Purity At The Moon

How I Extend Gnome

13 Nov 2020

I’ve recently migrated over to Fedora 33 after an unfortunate accident with my UbuntuDDE installation. Fedora has a very slick Gnome interface that is almost perfect in it’s implementation. Still, perfection is subjective, so I’ve added a couple tweaks here and there to get it just a little bit closer. Here’s what I’m using.

User Themes

I have this turned on, but as of yet haven’t used it. I’m pretty sure I’m going to in the future because I almost always do. For the time being, I’m happy with what Fedora 33 comes with.

OpenWeather

This is just one of those handy little things I love having in my top bar. I put it off to the right hand side with the WiFi, Sound settings, and the power controls. It shows the current weather where I am right now, and I can click it to get more details. It’s just one of the handier extensions that I rarely notice until it’s not installed, and then I find that I’m constantly looking for.

Dash to Dock

When I’m using Gnome, I can’t live without this one. I just really like having a dock down at the bottom of the screen with my most commonly used applications. I let it “smartly” hide itself when I’m using an application, so it’s not always in my field of view, but it’s there when I need it. In other distros, I’ve used Plank to fill this need, but Dash to Dock allows me to move the dash out of the overview screen and make it into a dock for me to use.

ArcMenu

This one pairs perfectly with Dash to Dock. I like Gnome, but I’ve never really gotten used to the application “screen”. I just want to launch an application, not flip around through multiple screens. This extension gives me a more traditional application menu with loads of configuration options. It also integrates with Dash to Dock, so I can place the menu in the dock like it was meant to be there.

That’s all I use. I’ve tried others, but most of the time they end up disabled and forgotten about. Some can change the behavior of Gnome even more than I have, but I just don’t feel that’s required for me personally.

If you’ve got some other cool and/or useful extensions you’re using for Gnome, I’d love to hear about them. I’m always looking for a new way to improve my UI.

Day 95 of the #100DaysToOffload Series.



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