Open-bar has to be my favourite Gnome extension in a while
GitHub - neuromorph/openbar: A GNOME Shell extension for theming Gnome Top Bar / Top Panel, Menus, Dash/Dock, Gnome Shell and Gtk/Flatpak Apps.
I don't run a lot of extensions on Gnome, but this one is a great way to add some customisation to the desktop.
Why?
I like a good extension ecosystem. For the mothership, GNOME, you can only implement one idea, maybe include a couple ideas but the boss or the group has to decide upon one idea. With extensions, everyone, even a maintainer herself, can write one. You do not have to talk to someone else. You can just do it.
As long as the api is well written, extensions are better than having one big mothership trying to accomplish everything and pleasing everyone. Imagine having an IDE without extensions. You have only the opinionated version of the main dev. With extensions, everyone can put his flavor on top of it without asking.
Edit: don't ask me why extensions and especially extension manager isn't included in GNOME itself.
IDK man, I’ve had rather poor experience with extensions. At least in gnome they pretty much filled in for some feature that should have been there but it wasn’t hip enough for GNOME (ie systray).
Ever since gnome 3 came out I found myself time and time again in the loop where something is missing, I build myself some smorgasbord of extensions to make the experience the way I want it, then a new gnome minor is released and some of those extensions are now abandoned / incompatible with others / suddenly buggy / behaving differently so I have to start over. It’s not very different in kde, extensions get abandoned and break in there too, but I never had to have more than two at a time.
When it comes to DEs I’ve learned over the years to stick to the core as much as possible because extensions are just not reliable, which is also the reason why I don’t use gnome anymore.
I don’t think the analogy with IDEs really holds: language extensions in major IDEs are usually maintained with some degree of professionalism, for example the Ansible extension for vscode is maintained by Red Hat. It’s a very different ecosystem from the one made of pet projects started by people who one time felt something was amiss in their DE, and pray the gods they still have that opinion and care enough.
Edit: just to be clear I’m not dunking on this extension or extensions in general, I’m just explaining why somebody would want to avoid relying on them too much
extensions are not supported in gnome. gnome devs do not care in the slightest if they break them whenever.
Wow, that's the biggest innovation in GNOME since Paperwm
I usually like to stay extension-free, but this looks pretty cool. I might try it out next time I'm on my PC. Something new.
Even Gnome-Tweaks?
I don't think Gnome Tweaks is an extension. Just an app that exposes some settings and DCONF options that haven't been added to the usual settings menu.
But nah, I don't use that either. Font settings really should be in the normal settings menu, though.
I pretty much change a couple of keybinds, remove a few .rpms and replace them with Flatpaks, and that's it.
This looks great, just installed it. Now to figure out how to make it looks totally transparent with just the different buttons and shrink it a bit like in the project's screenshots
In Top Bar Properties, select Type of Bar (Islands) and Height + Margins as needed
This extension looks fantastic. Good job guys
Blur my shell is pretty much what I use. I also have a wallpaper extension and knotifiersupport
Awesome. I'll see if it's a good replacement for Dash to Dock. Thanks.
Edit: Nope, but I can use them in tandem.
I'm new to Gnome, been using XFCE and Budgie for the longest time. Does this or any other extension allow offsetting the location of the date and time? A webcam attached to my monitor mostly blocks it.
I can't check at the moment, but that sounds like something 'Simply Perfection' would be capable of.
It's essentially an addon specifically for tweaking the appearance of gnome stuff.
This looks nice but what license does it use?
Good question. Odd not to include one.
It was in a subfolder. Probably a mistake.
GPL
https://github.com/neuromorph/openbar/blob/main/openbar%40neuromorph/LICENSE
Is is plnned to have global menu functionality as well?