[smoldesu]

This is neat, but it's a massive shame the GNOME developers abandoned the idea of a proper extension API. Something this trivial should not be a Mutter patch. This should be something you can apply as a user and have working immediately, ideally without a compositor restart even.

It felt like death by a thousand papercuts staying on GNOME during the v40 transition/update/overhaul. Seeing stuff like this ultimately just bums me out, it ultimately amounts to the user fighting the developers which should not be a problem with an open source project!

[circo]

And even the updates between 40-41-42 killed some extensions, especially shell related exts/themes.

[smoldesu]

Especially incremental updates. It already blew my mind that they broke the API so frequently with GNOME 3, the fact that they're still abusing extension developers like that in 2022 is unfathomable.

[mikhailt]

It’s one of the reasons I don’t look forward to upgrading my Linux install at all.

Arc menu, emoji picker, Dock extensions were something I used a lot and had to wait a while before they were compatible with certain Gnome versions. Emoji picker still isn’t, had to switch to Smile the flatpak package to make it work.

[hactually]

The thing with this is it's patching mutter, the window manager. Not shell which focuses on the extension stuff.

This is the equivalent of patching Quartz on MacOS to change behaviour.

[smoldesu]

That doesn't really matter, my point still stands: GNOME is responsible for developing Mutter, if it doesn't have an extension API then it's still their fault.