We spent the last 6 months polishing the experience, to make it more accessible and more user-friendly. Unlike the current tech industry, we go slow and fix things!
Big thanks to our contributors and donors who made this release possible🩷️ GNOME 51 should arrive to your distribution in the coming weeks, but you can check out GNOME OS Nightly in a VM/bare metal 👉️️ https://os.gnome.org
‼️GNOME OS is still experimental, don't use it for important stuff!
We also want to thank our gracious donors! Every donation matter and they allow us to be able to continue our Fellowship program, keep our infrastructure alive and support our community. Please become a friend of GNOME today! We need your support to keep going for another 29 years!
I did this by parallelizing most of the tasks in the app’s loading process and by lazy-loading many UI elements that only appear on other pages.
These changes let me remove the short but stuttery initial loading screen that you’re probably familiar with if you use Bazaar.
The 320ms is measured from launching Bazaar to its first frame on screen.
If you're one of the rare users running Linux on mobile, you might be interested in this. It's an extension that adds app navigation, an overhauled overview, and a custom onscreen keyboard. Amongst other things
Hi there, I'm one of the maintainer for BMS (MeguMario on Github), while this post is to showcase the new texture effect just merged into the refactor (don't worry you can make it to not look like this), I also want to clearing up the mess that is version 74 as well.
Well, for start, we are going to publish the hotfix that will fix the login delay issue for some setup on GNOME 46 in the coming days, the lack of GNOME 46 testing mean that it's on us to let this slip into the release. Sorry for the inconvenience!
Good news is, the refactor is near completion and should be merged soon after, if anyone want to try it out, please see this issue on how to try it out yourself, this should finally get rid of the external library dependency for good (which mean corner rounding out of the box now) and bring cool stuff like the effect above alongside liquid glass to dynamic blur as well. Your testing is much appreciated!
Small edit: I feel like this misconception that since ext-background-effect-v1 is merged, that mean GNOME Shell now have native blur for shell now is too widespread now, it does not apply to shell and moreso for applications to request blur from the compositor, shell will always handle blur in its own way. GNOME Shell will also follow their own design language so I don't think the extension will go out anytime soon.
I was just looking for extensions for customizing GNOME. I found many like BMS, just perfection, DMP, liquid glass, dhruva etc. But I didn't find any extension that adds shell animations, like notification menu, quick settings panel opening/closing animations or others.
I know ryhosuke's liquid glass does it, but are there no seperate extension for it?
If anyone knows of one, please tell me about it.
it sounds stupid, but i looked at the github and I just dont understand what it really does. Ive seen it pre-installed on distros, and everyone glazes it. But what does it even do?
I stumbled upon this project on GitHub, promising attractive theming for gnome. I really like what it promises and want to install it on my machine, but as it is a pretty new project i am kind of unsure whether its trustworthy.. whats y'alls verdict? Thanks in advance.
the github repo is https://github.com/DevWebeloper/aura-glass
Back in the days Dropdowns where a common method to offer quick actions without disturbing the windows on your desktop. As windows where a fairly static, that might have made sense. But dropdowns always had caveats:
They don't scale well. On small screens they overflow; on large ones they stay a small box
Although visually limited to little space they usually do not let the user interact with the major part of the screen so in fact are occupying the whole scree.
They close at the first click elsewhere. You can't keep the volume, Wi-Fi or a tray app's menu open while you work, so you reopen it again and again.
They cover your windows instead of sharing the space. A dropdown sits over exactly the content you might need, like the email you're answering while checking your calendar.
All those problems apply for gnome shell dropdowns. To improve on this the first derision we have to take is: Which elements need (a) to be shown alongside the opened windows and which one don't (b). All elements of type a can occupy the whole desktop replacing the opened windows. All elements of type by should be shown in a way alongside the opened windows which enables the user to interact with both.
In my opinion in Gnome all elements which lives in the calendar dropdown are of the type a. All that lives in the quick setting drop down are of the type b.
1. Quick Settingscould becomes a side pane
Mockup: Quick Settings becomes a side pane that shrinks the windows.
Click the system indicators and a pane would slide in from the right, from the panel to the bottom of the screen. It stays open while you use your apps: changing focus doesn't dismiss it. Your windows make room and come back when it closes. Drag its edge to resize it.
It holds GNOME's own controls: sliders, toggles, the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth menus. It would also hold a list of tray apps, background apps and other extensions' indicators. Their menus open inside the pane at full width. Tray icons (AppIndicators) could be hosted by the pane itself, so you wouldn't need a separate tray extension. This also could gives room for a decent clipboard integration:
Mockup: A pane instead of a dropdown give room for appindicator replacement and clipboard integration.
2. It would work in the overview too
Mockup: Pane in overview with Blur my shell.
An open pane stays open in the overview, and the search, workspaces and dash make room for it. With Blur my Shell, the pane takes the same blur as the panel.
3. The clock's dropdown becomes a Today page
Mockup: Clicking on the calendar/clock opens a today overview in the shell.
Click the clock (or press Super+M) and the overview opens with a Today page in place of the windows: notifications and media controls, a month calendar with the events of each day, the selected day's schedule, the weather forecast and world clocks.
i wanted a quick readout of what the focused window is doing without opening system monitor, so i wrote a little always on top panel called Syspeek. it shows app name, pid, cpu% and RSS for whatever window has focus, plus optional docker and kubernetes health.
for GNOME i ship a tiny shell extension that just writes the focused pid to a file in $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR, and the app reads it. the install script drops the extension in and enables it, but GNOME only loads new extensions at login so you need to log out and back in once before it works.
idle it sits around (RSS ~36 MB) and about 0.6% CPU, with a wakeup twice a second. it blips briefly when it shells out to docker or kubectl. It wouldnt lag whatsover and uses very very small amout of CPU.
Been working on this for a while. It puts an equalizer in the top bar, and clicking it opens a card with the cover, a seek bar and controls. It works with any MPRIS player: Spotify, Firefox, mpv, Flatpak stuff, whatever.
The bars can be swapped for an actual spectrum analyzer that reacts to the audio (works on PipeWire). That's the part I'm most happy with tbh.
Processing img vchcsx27dluh1...
You can also put it inside Quick Settings instead of having its own button. Supports GNOME 45 to 51.
If you just updated to gnome 51 and notice that your cursor you selected with gnome tweaks or any other tweaking tool doesn't work, i can help fix it. Here is a guide:
0) The actual issue:
Your cursor keeps being adwaita because the cursor you have selected, the one in the ~/.local/share/icons folder is an Xcursor. I don't know exactly what it is but it's very simple. It is basicly an older type of cursor file and gnome switched to something i believe more modern. You will need an svg based cursor. In this guide i will do all bibata cursors for arch based distros.
1)Installing it:
For bibata, install the library in terminal with this command:
yay -S bibata-material-cursor-theme-bin
You will nead an aur helper like yay or paru for it. But once done you can go to your tweaking tool like gnome tweaks and you can choose any bibata cursor you want.
That was it, i'm not familair with ubuntu/debian or fedora so maybe someone else knows that, if you know how let me know and i can edit this guide real quick for others with this problem.
the idea started because screen recording apps like recordly don't support custom cursor effects on linux (not even post production). i originally built this just for beautiful screen recordings, but i liked how it felt so i modified it for daily use.
how it works:
wayland is strict. to get this working natively, the extension applies an invisible cursor theme to the system. the smooth pointer you see in the video is actually a highly-tuned mouse trail following hardware coordinates.
the wayland limitation: wayland strictly isolates client windows for security. when you hover over text, apps don't request an "i-beam" shape, they just pass an arbitrary pixel buffer to the compositor. because of this, the extension has no way to know when an app wants a text selector to fix this, i added a shrink and bounce effect.
when you click or drag over text, the cursor physically shrinks. it makes selecting text feel tactile without needing to know what the app is doing underneath.
mass, stiffness, sparks, and colors are all configurable.
LLM Usage Disclosure: I used an AI assistant to help write and troubleshoot the GJS code for this extension. All architecture decisions, logic, and testing were driven by me.
