GNOME has always been one of the most popular desktop environments on Linux, and for good reason. It has always offered a cohesive, easy-to-navigate workspace that felt like macOS in all the right ways. It’s right up there with KDE in being one of the best desktop environments of all time.

That being said, it’s not perfect. The out-of-the-box experience is lacking, to say the least, and some of the design choices remain questionable. Thankfully, GNOME does allow for the use of extensions, some of which can completely transform the user interface. Many of these I would even consider essential, given how quirky and frustrating the default workflow can often be.

I’ll be listing a few favorites here, all of which are essential to my daily workflow.

Easy eject

If you’re like me and manage a docking station with your laptop, you probably have a bunch of USB devices connected to it. Managing multiple USB devices isn’t easy, especially for those with storage. This is especially true if you want to manually eject the drives without jumping into a file explorer, which seems pretty unnecessary for something as simple as this.

The Removable Drive Menu comes into play here. It’s a really simple app and basically adds a separate menu to list (and individually eject) your drives from. It’s pretty nifty and a lot more useful than you’d think. Admittedly, it’s not as mind-bending as some of the other extensions here, but I do find it quite helpful in a pinch.

Caffeine

Stay awake

Like macOS, GNOME also has no easy way to keep your screen awake at all times. After a brief moment of idling, the display will inevitably fade out (or switch to a screensaver), pushing the computer toward a sleep state. This makes Caffeine one of my top GNOME extensions, and an essential part of every install since it blocks auto-suspend and the screensaver.

There’s nothing quite as annoying as seeing the computer go to sleep midway through work, and Caffeine is an excellent choice that has saved me the pain of juggling my mouse around to keep the system awake. It’s also very easy to enable and resides in a tray icon on your taskbar.

Even better, the extension also comes equipped with preset and user-defined timers.

Blur my shell

Get that Tahoe look

Using the default GNOME desktop is surprisingly adequate. While it lacks a lot of deeper options, it is still a very pretty desktop. That being said, a lot of features seem to be intentionally left out. One of these features is blur, which allows for a smoky glass screen-like appearance to parts of the UI.

It’s certainly a puzzling omission for sure, and one that is thankfully quite easy to fix, even if the benefits are purely aesthetic.

The Blur My Shell extension aims to fix all that. Once installed, it adds a blur layer to parts of the Gnome shell, such as the overview and Dash, which makes for a very pleasant look over the default transparent interface. It does remind me of macOS Tahoe’s Liquid Glass, and in a good way.

Vitals

Live stats monitoring

There’s always an urge to keep track of system resources, and while the task manager equivalent in Gnome is fairly competent, bringing it up is a hassle. If only there were a widget to keep track of system resources! This is where the Vitals extension comes in, adding a taskbar widget (with basic info such as CPU and RAM usage) that can expand into a detailed menu.

This is really helpful in keeping track of system resources such as RAM when you’re doing something extensive like running a game or compiling a kernel. It also looks very cool and reminds me of the Stats application for macOS. Even if Stats has far more customization options available for the tray icon, this one is plenty fine for most use cases. If nothing else, it’s nerd eye candy.

Dash to panel

Game changer

Growing up with an OS (Windows, in this case) conditions you. You get used to its various quirks and design language, which is why shifting over to something with a vastly different design philosophy like macOS or Gnome is such a jarring experience.

Take the default panel, for example, which is oriented at the top instead of the bottom, which is the opposite of a Windows/KDE setup. Getting used to it is a bit of a pain since you have to rewire your brain.

Obviously, this is a matter of personal preference, but I’ve always found that a bottom taskbar makes more sense to have — at least in a non-tiling window manager environment. Using the Dash to Panel extension fixes all that, adding in a bottom bar with tweakable configs.

It looks a heck of a lot better, and I daresay even better than stock KDE. Even if the options are painfully limited. This is probably my favorite extension of the list, and one that I add to every Gnome install, without which it feels incomplete.

Extensions feel essential, but I’m not a fan of their implementation

Using Gnome without extensions is like building a PC in a boring office case. Sure, it works, but is it visually appealing? Not even close. The GNOME defaults are perfectly fine (it is an opinionated DE after all), but why would you when you have so many cool additions to choose from?

Extensions feel like a necessity at this point. Without them, customizing Gnome feels nigh impossible, and the functionality offered by them feels too good to pass up on. That being said, I’m not a fan of the overreliance of extensions, for the most basic of things. Simple stuff like being able to adjust the taskbar should be enforced within the desktop settings, and not by having to install an extension from the web. These are things that do not need to be so overly complicated, and extensions have always felt a bit iffy to me.

This is perhaps one of the reasons why I prefer KDE, and while extensions are (mostly) fine, they’re just not my preferred go-to solution.