Do gnome updates still break all your plugins?
this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2026
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GNOME major upgrades (v48, v49...) always break extensions by design to force the extension maintainers to update. It's generally recommended to hold off on upgrading for a few weeks to give maintainers time to update their extensions.
It's the msot stupid thing any linux dev every decided - imo.
Extensions can crash your system on GNOME as they modify the shell itself, so running incompatible extensions is a real problem. The upside to this is that when you find an extension and it has your version on it, it's guaranteed to run. Fyi you can easilly override the version requirements.
That's the dev perspective, I have a user perspective.
sometimes the extension works and sometimes it doesn't. And there is no appearant reason why it doesn't work. That leads to disliking updates because it breaks my installation. Welcome to windows :/
It shouldn't break as long as you download the extensions through the distro's repos. Sure, it's a relative small collection, but it happens to hold everything I personally need.
If you need more than a handful of the major plugins (which won't break), you're likely better off with a different DE.
Also, if you install plugins and Gnome from different sources (like Gnome from your distro and plugins directly from the Gnome project's website), then YOU take on the job of making sure they're compatible.
With KDE and additional user-made Plasma widgets you have the same issue.
probably, though I've not had that in a good while