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Must have GNOME extensions

Deepu K Sasidharan on June 24, 2019

Originally published at deepu.tech. I'm a sucker for nice polished UI and great UX. While there are a lot of Linux Desktop environments out there ...
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mustafapc19

U are trying to emulate unity with these plugins rather then surrendering to the will of the gnome devs. Just surrender. You will gnome way more enjoyable. Even I use extensions but non-of them impact UX or UI much. Example GSConnect, clipboard indicator,vscode-search.

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Deepu K Sasidharan

I tried GNOME way and I didn't like it. I don't see how this is a Unity thing. I have never used Unity as I hated the look and feel of it.

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mustafapc19

Feels kinda unity to me. And like I said. Do not resist. Surrender. That is the gnome way. :)

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Deepu K Sasidharan

Sorry, Kinda opinionated when it comes to UX and default GNOME way IMO sucks in some areas :P

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mustafapc19

Even I was in the same place. I used like a gazillion extensions, some for pure aesthetic reasons. It made the shell slow and I themed a lot too. All this made shell very laggy and cluttered. One day I slashed like 10 extensions together. And now I am at 5 extensions I guess which doesn't meddle much with the UI/UX . Out of which I rarely use one(windowNavigator). Like the whole thing is is pretty much optimized for trackpad. If u want to switch just start slashing extensions one by one. And finally you'll understand vanilla gnome's U/X.

p.s for trackpad use Wayland. Many gnome apps have multi-finger gestures.

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Deepu K Sasidharan

As I said I'm pretty opinionated on UX and vanilla experience is not something I liked so there is no way I'm going back there again. Also, I don't think any of these extensions are heavy and anyway I have never felt any lag/clutter in my setup. Thanks for the suggestions anyway.

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memeplex

You don't need to use an extension to change the window switcher. Just go to the keyboard settings and change the Alt-Tab shortcut to Switch Windows. Also github.com/ubuntu/gnome-shell-exte... is preferred to TopIcons+, which is unmaintained and AFAIK doesn't support 3.32 (correct me if I'm wrong here, please). Thank you for the list.

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Deepu K Sasidharan

Hey, thanks for the Tips. Didn't know TopIcons+ was abandoned. It works for me with the latest Gnome 3.32.2 version though. I'll check the one you suggested.

Which keyboard setting do you mean, are you talking about updating the keyboard shortcut?

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memeplex

Yes, the Keyboard settings screen with the list of shortcuts. There you will find four combinations of switching settings: [Directly] Switch (Applications|Windows). Directly means without showing the switcher, those are the one mapped to Alt-Esc and Alt-F6 by default. The one in your screenshot, with the previews and icons, is Switch Windows. You can even configure if you want to show icons or not and other stuff, but for that you need Dconf Editor.

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Deepu K Sasidharan

Thanks will check

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Alex Takitani

I've tried the same plugins and similar configuration a few months back. Still not as good as Cinnamon 4.0 to emulate a "classic" desktop ( Win 7 and 10 ).