With the current release of Fedora Linux being updated to version 40 this week, I find myself upgrading to it on the first day of release (rare for me, I usually wait a couple of months) and getting up-to-speed with the changes in Gnome 46. My previous post about Gnome focused on my migration to Gnome 3 and the extensions I was using at the time. During the course of the previous (nearly) 5 years, these have changed quite significantly as the Gnome desktop has grown and as my usage of it has moved on. Hence, rather than update my old post as I have done in previous years, I thought it time to write a whole new post focusing on how I set up my Gnome desktop today.
So without further ado, this is the list of extensions I'm using right now as I write this post (in alphabetical order):
AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support
This is one of the few extensions that has stood the test of time with my particular usage of Gnome. While the free desktop standard continues to specify the classic "icon tray" that was supported by extensions such as TopIcons, in reality few of the modern desktops (I'm referring to Gnome and KDE) support them. The modern take on the tray icon is an AppIndicator icon and many modern applications are written to use this standard (and perhaps fall back to a tray icon).
This is a more recent discovery for me. I've previously evaluated Dash to Dock several times and never liked the user experience. However, the similarly named and with somewhat similar functionality, Dash to Dock has replaced my use of the Window List extension. It provides a more modern alternative to showing which windows I have open with window previews and suchlike. It can do considerably more than the way I've configured it, but I have it set just how I like to work with my Gnome top bar still in tact and a minimal bottom bar used for navigating between my open applications. If you want to try it out with my configuration, I've exported my settings into this GitHub Gist that you can import.
It takes your favourited applications and adds them as a set of icons to the Gnome top panel, making for extra quick access to your commonly used apps. I tend to flip between using this and just searching for apps via the Super button (windows key).
GTile
This great little extension allows you to easily resize your windows in order to tile them across your display. I love the side-snapping in Gnome 3 that allows you to size a window to half the screen size. However, GTile adds an icon to your Gnome Panel that, when clicked, allows you to size to any area of your screen across a pre-defined grid - you can even change the grid size. Brilliant for usability with lots of on-screen windows at the same time. It strikes a great balance for me as someone that generally prefers to tile windows but doesn't like a tiling window manager.
This is almost a little bit superfluous for my usage but I found myself never using the activities button (top left) in the Gnome Panel. The Dash to Panel configuration I have created maintains an activities button (bottom right) which is the place I've grown familiar with in order to use my GUI to switch between desktops (although I generally switch between desktops using keyboard shortcuts).
This is a really great modern take on the clipboard. Press shift+windows+v and you get a pop up at the bottom of the screen with a graphical representation of your clipboard history. The extension is clever enough to be aware of various types of clipboard content such as text, images or hyperlinks. You also get a button on the top panel that allows access to the clipboard, incogneto mode (stops copying stuff to the extension) and settings.
Adds little graphs to the Gnome Panel that show resource usage. The
extension is pretty configurable but I have it showing CPU, memory and
network utilisation. This allows me to keep an easy eye on my machine
and how loaded it is at the current time. Extremely useful for spotting
those occasional rogue apps that start eating an entire core of my CPU.
