I had some debates with Gnome devs about it which I primarily take my points from. One of them told me they actively decided against an API, for the mentioned reason.
Looking at some old screenshot, before I cleaned out a lot in an attempt to stop the crashing I had these (don’t know which ones were still active when it crashed the third time, I only know it was about 7 to 8 and that I immediately began looking up how to install KDE out of frustration).
Dash to Dock
GSConnect
Media Label and Controls (Mpris Label)
Net Speed(definitely deleted this one later)
Next Up
RebootToUEFI
RunCat
Tray Icons: Reloaded(This is a freaking technical necessity)
TwitchLive Panel(definitely deleted this one later)
Ah ok. I have not heard of most of those. Here’s what I’ve been using:
Come to think of it, I did have some issues with open bar and dash to dock a while back, but I’m pretty sure it was because 1) I was using dash to dock with pop_os’s cosmic dock and those two do sort of the same thing so they probably conflicted and 2) pop_os is pretty behind on Gnome in general. Right now I think the are 6 major versions behind! Since a few months ago, the issues cleared up.
Also, I do realize that theming on Gnome isn’t officially supported on an OS level, and I don’t fully understand it all, but I do have a fairly consistently-used custom theme installed using Gnome tweaks. GTK3 iirc.
Gnome may have some issues, but I still think it’s a much cleaner UI than KDE, and I’m pretty used to it at this point.
You’re in a rather special position regarding the extensions in this case because except for 3 of them, they’re all directly maintained by your distro of choice. Which, additionally, is super slow with updating due to focusing on getting Cosmic ready and therefore extremely stable (and outdated) given nothing changes.
Distro-specific extensions really are one of the few places where this kind of unstable extension system makes sense, since your distro maintainer also controls the update flow of Gnome for you and can do proper QA on it w/ those extensions before making updates available. It’s not a mix’n’match of code.
Also, I do realize that theming on Gnome isn’t officially supported on an OS level, and I don’t fully understand it all, but I do have a fairly consistently-used custom theme installed using Gnome tweaks. GTK3 iirc.
Modern Gnome applications using libadwaita instead of GTK3 or 4 will happily mostly ignore those, and the “User Themes” extension you need on modern Gnome to enable theming likes to cause problems. Usually one of the first “recommendations” you’ll hear when Gnome starts misbehaving is to disable your themes as Gnome just does not want to have them. I was just straight-up told to “not use Extensions if you want a stable system” (after losing about 40 minutes of work, again).
I get what you’re saying regarding my extensions, but that’s only my desktop which is on pop os as you know. I also run arch on a raspberry pi 5 with gnome 48.5, Freon, dash to dock, and hide activities button extensions. On my laptop which runs fedora, gnome 48.4, and app indicator, dash to dock and Freon extensions. Don’t remember ever having a problem with those. My general feeling is that yes extensions can have problems, so best to install only a few.
You say that about theming, but on pop os most apps accept the gtk theming and look great, no crashes – I’m sure that’s due to being on the old gnome version. The other two machines, I haven’t messed with theming much because it already looks pretty decent to me, and those machines are more for casual use anyhow.
I had some debates with Gnome devs about it which I primarily take my points from. One of them told me they actively decided against an API, for the mentioned reason.
Looking at some old screenshot, before I cleaned out a lot in an attempt to stop the crashing I had these (don’t know which ones were still active when it crashed the third time, I only know it was about 7 to 8 and that I immediately began looking up how to install KDE out of frustration).
Ah ok. I have not heard of most of those. Here’s what I’ve been using:
Come to think of it, I did have some issues with open bar and dash to dock a while back, but I’m pretty sure it was because 1) I was using dash to dock with pop_os’s cosmic dock and those two do sort of the same thing so they probably conflicted and 2) pop_os is pretty behind on Gnome in general. Right now I think the are 6 major versions behind! Since a few months ago, the issues cleared up.
Also, I do realize that theming on Gnome isn’t officially supported on an OS level, and I don’t fully understand it all, but I do have a fairly consistently-used custom theme installed using Gnome tweaks. GTK3 iirc.
Gnome may have some issues, but I still think it’s a much cleaner UI than KDE, and I’m pretty used to it at this point.
You’re in a rather special position regarding the extensions in this case because except for 3 of them, they’re all directly maintained by your distro of choice. Which, additionally, is super slow with updating due to focusing on getting Cosmic ready and therefore extremely stable (and outdated) given nothing changes. Distro-specific extensions really are one of the few places where this kind of unstable extension system makes sense, since your distro maintainer also controls the update flow of Gnome for you and can do proper QA on it w/ those extensions before making updates available. It’s not a mix’n’match of code.
Modern Gnome applications using libadwaita instead of GTK3 or 4 will happily mostly ignore those, and the “User Themes” extension you need on modern Gnome to enable theming likes to cause problems. Usually one of the first “recommendations” you’ll hear when Gnome starts misbehaving is to disable your themes as Gnome just does not want to have them. I was just straight-up told to “not use Extensions if you want a stable system” (after losing about 40 minutes of work, again).
I get what you’re saying regarding my extensions, but that’s only my desktop which is on pop os as you know. I also run arch on a raspberry pi 5 with gnome 48.5, Freon, dash to dock, and hide activities button extensions. On my laptop which runs fedora, gnome 48.4, and app indicator, dash to dock and Freon extensions. Don’t remember ever having a problem with those. My general feeling is that yes extensions can have problems, so best to install only a few.
You say that about theming, but on pop os most apps accept the gtk theming and look great, no crashes – I’m sure that’s due to being on the old gnome version. The other two machines, I haven’t messed with theming much because it already looks pretty decent to me, and those machines are more for casual use anyhow.