GNOME Shell Extensions Are Live

DrXym writes "GNOME Shell has been criticized for certain shortcomings when compared to GNOME 2.x. Chief amongst them was that 2.x offered panel applets whereas 3.x is seemingly lacking any such functionality. What most people don't know is that GNOME Shell has a rich extension framework similar to Mozilla Firefox add-ons. Now, the official site to install extensions has gone live. So if you yearn for an application menu, or a dock, or a status monitor, then head on over. Extensions can be installed with a few clicks and removed just as easily."

Comments

It's not just GNOME 3.

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot of major open source projects that have gone stupid over the past year or two. Firefox is the other big one, of course. But we've seen similar stupidity from Thunderbird and Ubuntu, for instance.

It's like a big mass of unemployed web designers have moved on to fucking up real applications, perhaps because nobody will hire them to do web development any more, given similar fuck-ups in the past.

No, we don't want gradients and curved corners all over the place. No, we don't want the menus to be removed. No, we don't want the status bar to be hidden. We just want software that works, and these failed designers just can't provide that!

Re:It's not just GNOME 3.

[rapidreload]

thats why linux values freedom of choice most of all. If you don't like it, switch and quit your bitchen. try fluxbox or Awsome. The gnome expatriate DE of choice has been XFCE but i think theres a branch of metacity being mantained like there's a kde3 branch being maintained

I really hate this retort. A lot of people used GNOME 2 because it was the best at what it did. Either KDE was too complicated (too many options/controls) or XFCE was too lean (lacking in functionality). GNOME 2 had a nice middle-ground. With GNOME 3 fucking up things, we have a problem. We can stick with GNOME 2 until it falls into disrepair (which does happen when libraries are upgraded but the DE is not), or we can switch to something like MATE which is still in development.

The problem with the argument of how Linux provides options is that they aren't necessarily any good. People generally use one DE over another because it provides something the others don't. If the development direction of said DE makes it no longer desirable, all the freedom of choice doesn't help much if now ALL of your options are lackluster as opposed to all but one.

Extensions suck

[0123456]

Sure, they're good in theory, but after you've been using some extension for years the Gnome developers decide that they want Change and then your extension breaks and the developer hasn't updated it in a long time because it's done and there's really no way to improve it, and now it's dead unless someone else learns whatever arcane Gnome-isms are required to fix it.

Users simply can't rely on anything outside the main code development tree, and with Gnome you can't even rely on that.

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[Shadow of Eternity]

No, it's not a problem at all. The problem is the fallacy that in order to make a UI that appeals to new users you must automatically get rid of everything that your old users liked about the original. You CAN have both, just bury the option to switch somewhere that only the old power users will find and you're fine.

Re:Dead -- to nerds

[DemonGenius]

I'm a nerd, but I also like to get meaningful work done without having to tweak a UI everyday. Up until Ubuntu 10.10 I had the benefit of an attractive AND functional desktop, heck, I even finally perfected my ideal desktop configuration with 10.10, even with warming up to the stupid-application-buttons-on-the-left-side-of-the-title-bar-because-we-want-to-be-like-Apple. However, as much as I like change, the kind of change that prevents me from effectively using my main computer exactly the way I want will drive me away. They could have at least had the courtesy to make the new UI into a separate DE that can be selected at the login screen, but apparently that was too much to ask... bastards. This is why I've switched to Mint and will not look back until the Mint team gets on the idiot UI bandwagon.

Re:And yet...

[icebike]

By "dock" I mean, some form graphical display that lists currently running programs intermingled with programs that you can lauch if you wish.

So, a mashup of popular items from the 'Start' menu and the currently running windows list. A list of two completely different things - action buttons and status buttons

See, that doesn't bother me a bit. The only thing I use that type of facility for is High Frequency items, email, browser, file manager, command shells. If one of those is ALREADY open I want the open one 99.94444% of the time, and if I want a new one, its left click.

You keep most menu items in the start-bar menu / what ever you want to call it. But the high frequency items I want handy, and If they are running already chances are I want the running one, and not another one.

It may not be to your liking, but it is very well thought out in all the implementations I've see of something like that. Why dig thru application menus? Computers are supposed to be intuitive. See icon, click Icon, get the desired result. They are not two completely different things. Its the way people work.