Cross-posted from "It's that time again" by @Atherel@lemmy.dbzer0.com in !linux_memes@programming.dev
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2025
818 points (98.1% liked)
linuxmemes
27556 readers
909 users here now
Hint: :q!
Sister communities:
Community rules (click to expand)
1. Follow the site-wide rules
- Instance-wide TOS: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Lemmy code of conduct: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html
2. Be civil
- Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
- Do not harrass or attack users for any reason. This includes using blanket terms, like "every user of thing".
- Don't get baited into back-and-forth insults. We are not animals.
- Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
- Bigotry will not be tolerated.
3. Post Linux-related content
- Including Unix and BSD.
- Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of
sudoin Windows. - No porn, no politics, no trolling or ragebaiting.
4. No recent reposts
- Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, <loves/tolerates/hates> systemd, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.
5. π¬π§ Language/ΡΠ·ΡΠΊ/Sprache
- This is primarily an English-speaking community. π¬π§π¦πΊπΊπΈ
- Comments written in other languages are allowed.
- The substance of a post should be comprehensible for people who only speak English.
- Titles and post bodies written in other languages will be allowed, but only as long as the above rule is observed.
6. (NEW!) Regarding public figures
We all have our opinions, and certain public figures can be divisive. Keep in mind that this is a community for memes and light-hearted fun, not for airing grievances or leveling accusations. - Keep discussions polite and free of disparagement.
- We are never in possession of all of the facts. Defamatory comments will not be tolerated.
- Discussions that get too heated will be locked and offending comments removed. Β
Please report posts and comments that break these rules!
Important: never execute code or follow advice that you don't understand or can't verify, especially here. The word of the day is credibility. This is a meme community -- even the most helpful comments might just be shitposts that can damage your system. Be aware, be smart, don't remove France.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I am pretty much in the same boat. I think I have had one or two extensions break, but they weren't ones I depended on and they didn't seem that well maintained to begin with.
You guys are incredibly lucky then. I ran about 7 to 8 extensions and had the whole shell crash 3 times on me over a time of a few weeks, making me lose progress. The journal logs weren't helpful, the gnome-shell just crashed and bailed.
GNOME only makes it possible to make Extensions via directly patching shell code and refuses to create an API. They can say whatever they want, this way of doing things is inherently unstable and will always break at some point, and it's not primarily the fault of extension devs or users if that happens given there literally is no other way of doing it. Even something as simple as the RunCat extension is potentially able to crash your whole desktop. This is comparable to every single modification you do in KDE being a KWin script (that settings window does have a warning in front of it for a reason). Another comparison: This is also similar to how Firefox did Extensions until they adopted the common extension API in Firefox 3 (?), before then that browser was known to be crashing a lot and become sluggish quickly since any extension was monkey-patching code into it - exactly what Gnome extensions do to work.
It's one thing to have a clear design idea, but Gnome took away so many freedoms (even basic theming) while merely providing an absolutely ridiculous way for even the smallest customization to then blame users and extension devs when something breaks or becomes unstable. It's no wonder people are upset. System76 outright began to work from scratch, meanwhile Linux Mint is providing libadapta as drop-in replacement for libadwaita to patch basic theming features back into programs that use it.
If Cosmic drops its version 1.0 and keeps its promises I'd bet a lot on Gnome slowly but surely declining. It does what Gnome doesn't want to.
You clearly know a lot about how it works and I do not. I am curious though -- what extensions are you using that break?
I am hoping cosmic is all it's cracked up to be. I'd definitely consider switching for the performance benefits alone
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.