Why I Started Looking At GNOME Extensions
I’ve always liked GNOME because it stays out of my way. Install Ubuntu, open a terminal, and you’re good to go.
A few days ago, a friend introduced me to some GNOME extensions he uses. They were pretty cool, so I went down a rabbit hole looking for more. Some of them are gimmicky, some are genuinely useful, and some are just plain fun. I ended up liking quite a few of them, so I thought I’d write about them and let others know as well.
I was also using my company machine for part of this experiment. It runs GNOME Shell 3.x on Ubuntu 22.04, so I came across a few older extensions too. I’ll keep those to myself for now—they work well enough on that machine, but I don’t think they’re interesting enough to recommend here.
These are the extensions that I either genuinely liked or thought other people would find cool.
Burn My Windows
Burn My Windows replaces the default window animations with effects like fire, glitches, TV shutdowns, matrix effects, and a bunch of other ridiculous animations.
This is one of the gimmicky ones, but if you are a fresher like me and you have freshers coworkers - they will go crazy when they see this animation.
Animations are decently polished. If you’ve never customized GNOME before, this is probably the extension I’d recommend trying first.
Clipboard Indicator
Clipboard Indicator keeps a history of everything you copy.
This is probably the most useful extension on this list.
I spend most of my day switching between terminals, documentation, GitHub, and Slack. At some point, I always end up copying something important and then immediately overwriting it with something else.
With Clipboard Indicator, that problem mostly disappears.
Coverflow Alt-Tab
Coverflow Alt-Tab replaces the default Alt+Tab switcher with a much nicer animation.
Functionally, nothing changes. You are still switching between windows.
It just looks cooler.
I didn’t think I would care about this one, but after using it for a few days, going back to the default Alt+Tab in my company laptop felt a little boring.
Open Bar
Open Bar lets you customize the GNOME top panel.
You can add transparency, gradients, rounded edges, and a bunch of other visual tweaks.
I liked this one because it improves the look of the desktop without completely changing it. It makes GNOME feel a little less stock.
Rounded Window Corners Reborn
This one is simple.
It adds rounded corners to application windows.
The difference is subtle, and honestly, you might not even notice it after a few days.
It works especially well alongside Open Bar.
Dash to Dock
I have to mention Dash to Dock because my friend would read this, and he really liked it :)
This moves the dash out of the overview transforming it in a dock for an easier launching of applications and a faster switching between windows and desktops.
A lot of people love it. I don’t.
One thing some people may like would be the auto-hide mode (but that also comes with default GNOME so you can probably use that for auto hide).
Thank You
Thank you for reading. If you have a cool GNOME extension that I should try next, feel free to let me know on my socials :)