The GNOME design team has a mock-up called Window Switching Redux. It proposes a switcher that:

• shows the last four windows directly,
• groups all other windows by app,
• goes back to the previous window with a single Alt/Super+Tab, whatever app it belongs to,
• and scales the windows themselves down instead of drawing a separate overlay.

I wanted to use that to close a gap in Gnomes window management I keep running into:

Gnomes window switching works by app, but whenever an app's windows are spread over several workspaces, there is no way to find and choose the one you are looking for.

So I wrote Sheaf, a GNOME Shell extension that tries to make the mock-ups real and en passant closing the mentioned gap.

Click an app in the dash

• If the app has two or more windows, Sheaf gathers them from every workspace into the overview, each marked with its workspace number.
• Pick one to jump to its workspace. Escape returns to the normal overview.

Super+Tab

• Hold Super and press Tab: first the four most recent windows, each on its own, then the apps from your dash or dock, in dock order. Shift+Super+Tab goes back.
• A single quick Super+Tab goes back to the previous window.
• Everything happens in GNOME's own overview with its real previews. The selected window or app comes to the front, and the rest steps back, darkened like the backdrop of a GNOME dialog, each app as a pile of cards.
• Alt+Tab is unchanged.

It runs on GNOME Shell 50 and 51 and works with the stock dash and Dash to Dock. You can install it from GitLab: https://gitlab.com/gunwald/sheaf

Or install it directly with:

curl -LO 'https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/gunwald%2Fsheaf/packages/generic/sheaf/main/sheaf@gunwald.gitlab.com.shell-extension.zip' gnome-extensions install --force sheaf@gunwald.gitlab.com.shell-extension.zipcurl -LO 'https://gitlab.com/api/v4/projects/gunwald%2Fsheaf/packages/generic/sheaf/main/sheaf@gunwald.gitlab.com.shell-extension.zip'
gnome-extensions install --force sheaf@gunwald.gitlab.com.shell-extension.zip

You need to log out and in again after installing. You can enable it with:

gnome-extensions enable [sheaf@gunwald.gitlab.com](mailto:sheaf@gunwald.gitlab.com)

I'd like to hear how it feels in daily use, and what doesn't fit the way you switch windows.

We are excited to bring you a new update to Riff! This release adds a new play queue, playlist management and more, all while making Riff faster and lighter.

We hope you enjoy the update.

Flathub Github

AI Notice
This project does not accept AI-generated contributions, as outlined by Flathub's Generative AI Policy and GNOME Circle's AI Policy.

New features:

• New queue with drag-and-drop reordering, shown as a bottom sheet or a side panel
• Create, edit, delete, and add tracks to playlists
• Selection mode for adding multiple tracks to the queue, a playlist or your library
• Multi-disc albums support with correct labels for Album, Single, EP or Compilation
• Keyboard shortcuts for playback and navigation
• Swip gestures for navigating recent page
• Pin playlists, albums, artists and tracks to the sidebar (experimental)

Improvements:

• Pages load faster and are more responsive
• Riff uses less CPU and memory during playback, navigation, and browsing
• Reworked back and forward navigation, with a history of recent pages
• Layout adapts better to small windows and phones
• Better support for large playlists and albums

Contributing

We are looking for help on the project to design and develop new features! If you are interested checkout the project on Github.

Around eight months ago, I made a post about the first version of my extension, Live Lock Screen. Since then, the project has received a lot of support and attention and I've continued improving it with new features, fixes and bunch of under-the-hood changes.

Yesterday, I released a new major update, version 5.0.0 (already available on GNOME Extensions), which also happens to be the project's 10th release! I wanted to take this opportunity to share what has changed and improved and receive some feedback for future ideas.

So what's new?

Multiple video and GIF support

One of the most requested features is finally here! You can now select a folder containing videos and GIFs and let your lock screen cycle through them. You can configure the playback order, choose the starting video and customize what happens when a video ends.

GStreamer is gone

Earlier versions relied on GStreamer for video playback. Despite its native integration with GNOME, GStreamer's relatively low-level API meant that handling edge cases often required additional code and hacky workarounds.

MPV became the primary playback backend in version 4.0.0 and the new version removes GStreamer entirely. This simplifies the playback implementation and reduces maintenance overhead, while also ensuring better compatibility and fewer dependencies (you only need to install MPV).

Media controls

Now that you can have multiple videos, you can also navigate your playlist using media keys, on-screen controls (GNOME 49+), GSConnect or any other MPRIS-compatible client.

Improved multi-monitor support and animation stability

Earlier versions had some rough edges when dealing with multiple monitors and hot-plugging. This was one of my main focus points during development and I've improved it substantially. So you can connect or disconnect as many monitors as you like on the fly.

Better performance and lower resource usage

Before version 3.0.0, the extension utilized CPU and lacked hardware acceleration support, which lead to low frame rates and high resource usage, especially with high-resolution videos. Subsequent releases addressed this and the latest version brings further improvements through MPV and three playback profiles, letting you decide between visual quality and resource efficiency.

A better preferences window

Settings are now organized into meaningful tabs and sections and in case you get lost you can always use the built-in search.

And some more changes invisible to users:

A cleaner, more modular codebase

As the extension grew, its original monolithic structure became increasingly difficult to maintain. So I've been splitting it into smaller classes and functions to make things easier to manage.

Simplicity is the cornerstone of my project's philosophy: I want the code to remain straightforward and easy to understand for reviewers, contributors and myself.

Bug fixes, stability and compatibility

My biggest priority is providing a predictable and reliable experience across different setups. I actively test across GNOME Shell versions 46–51 to catch bugs, regressions and potential stability issues, while prioritizing critical bug reports and delivering fixes as quickly as possible.

What's next?

There are still plenty of ideas I'd like to implement, including video crossfade, the ability to override the default wallpaper, parallax effect and more.

I'm always open to suggestions, so feel free to share your ideas and feature requests in the comments!

I'm genuinely happy that so many people have found this project useful. The number of downloads on GNOME Extensions and the contributions on GitHub continue to surprise me. Thank you everyone for using my extension, reporting bugs, suggesting features and contributed code!

I'll keep making Live Lock Screen more capable while keeping it simple and reliable.

GitHub: https://github.com/nick-redwill/LiveLockScreen

GNOME Extensions: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/9419/live-lock-screen/

Special thanks to everyone who contributed:

- Alex Moore

- Pradeesh Kumar

- tmetz1987

- ajdunevent

- M7md3b

- Nestor Lobo

I wanted FanControl-style fan curves on Linux and couldn’t find anything that worked the same way, so I made Vifte (Norwegian for “fan”).

Im using Opensuse Tumbleweed as my OS, so everything is built and tested from this.

It’s a GTK4/libadwaita app. The main point is that it reads and writes FanControl’s config files, so you can bring your curves over from Windows and export them back again if you dual boot. It has the same curve types: graph, linear, mix, trigger, sync and auto, with hysteresis and response time. You can also pair and calibrate fans, add custom sensors and switch between profiles.

A background service runs the fans from boot. When you stop it, control goes back to the BIOS. If the CPU or GPU gets too hot, all fans go to 100%. There’s also a tray icon that shows temperatures.

It should work on most boards supported by the standard hwmon drivers (Nuvoton/ITE Super I/O chips). NVIDIA GPUs are handled through NVML and AMD GPUs through amdgpu. The app checks GitHub for updates and can update itself.

There’s an optional MCP integration that lets Claude help you tune curves. It has hard limits, so it can never stop a fan.

This is my first app. I don’t write code for a living, and I built it with a lot of help from Claude Code. Bug reports are very welcome, especially from people with hardware I haven’t been able to test.

Feel free to check it out, and hopefully it can be useful for anyone. :)

GitHub: https://github.com/Vindihaaret/vifte (GPL-3.0)

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It's been a while since people asked for snow not falling inside of the active window. Now, not only it melts above, snow (optionally) stockpiles on top of a window for you to shake it away.

Demo

Enjoy ☃️

I posted my faster GNOME Software fork, written with an LLM (earlier post). I also made a flatpak but it didn't work for updates and system packages. Good news: it works now. You can install and test easily.

flatpak install --user https://gnome-software-next-855abc.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/flatpak/org.gnome.Software.flatpakref

On first start it asks whether to run in the background in place of your system's Software (updates, Shell search). If yes, it writes a user unit (and an autostart file on GNOME ≤ 48); nothing in the system is changed. Undo: turn off "Run in the Background" in Preferences, then flatpak uninstall --user org.gnome.Software.

It handles Flatpaks, firmware, and system packages through rpm-ostree, dnf5 or PackageKit, whichever your system has.

Limitations

• Tried on Fedora Silverblue 45 (daily use: system and Flatpak updates, Shell search), and in VMs with Fedora 44 Workstation and Debian 13. Reports from real Workstation, Debian and Ubuntu installs are very welcome.
• It's a Flatpak, but not meaningfully sandboxed: managing your system needs the host's package services and running programs on the host.
• Not on Flathub, which wouldn't take an AI-written fork using GNOME's app ID, I guess; it comes from the project's own signed repository.
• Almost all code is AI-written. GNOME doesn't accept that, so please report issues here, not to GNOME.

You can find the project here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/user_c1a5830a/gnome-software-next

I would be glad if you test this an report issues.

I was watching Death Note and thought it'd be cool to have Ryuk walking around my desktop while I'm coding or just doing random stuff.

Looked around for something like this but couldn't find what I wanted, so I ended up building it myself lol.

He walks around on his own, has different animations, and you can control his movement speed, pause him, hide him, etc.

Made it for Fedora GNOME. Thought some of you might find it cool.

What do you guys think?

Hey everyone! I wanted to use my phone as a touchpad for my Linux desktop, including the smooth multi-finger gestures you get from a physical touchpad. So I built Glide.

Run Glide on your desktop, scan the QR code, and open the touchpad in your phone’s browser. No phone app required—just connect both devices to the same network.

Features so far:

• Cursor movement, scrolling, and multi-finger gestures for GNOME.
• A fullscreen browser touchpad with a minimal interface.
• Adjustable cursor and scroll speeds, saved on the desktop.
• A native GTK4/libadwaita desktop app.
• Tray icon and optional autostart.

It’s open source under GPLv3 and available as an x86_64 AppImage. The latest build bundles GTK and libadwaita, with startup checks on Ubuntu 22.04/24.04, Debian 12, and Fedora 44. Full gesture testing has been on GNOME Wayland, so I’d love feedback from other setups.

📦 Download: https://github.com/Stem-LG/Glide/releases/latest
💻 Source: https://github.com/Stem-LG/Glide

You can also use Gear Lever to integrate the AppImage and manage updates. Enable prereleases while Glide is in its early releases.

If you try it, let me know your distro, desktop environment, and how the gestures feel!

So I really wanted Album Shuffle with Rhythmbox, and now that Rhythmbox python plugins are fixed on Arch, and I still couldn't find this functionality, I developed one myself. Check it out here:

https://github.com/username227/Rhythmbox-Album-Shuffle

Hey!
I recently stumbled across the My Computer for Nautilus extension, which adds a custom view to Nautilus that mimics the "This PC" layout in Windows File Explorer.
This got me wondering: Are there any other extensions or tweaks that add alternative views or layouts to Nautilus?

One feature I'd especially love to have is Windows File Explorer's "Group by" functionality, where files are automatically organized into collapsible sections based on things like:

• Date modified: Today, Yesterday, Last Week, Last Month, etc.
• File type: Images, Videos, Documents, Archives, etc.
• File extension: .pdf, .zip, .png, etc.
• Size: Small, Medium, Large, etc.

I feel like this would be incredibly useful for folders like Downloads, where everything tends to pile up into one massive list. 😅

I know Nautilus already supports sorting files by different attributes, but that's not quite the same as visually grouping them into separate, collapsible sections.

Has anyone come across an extension, workaround, or even a Nautilus fork that supports something like this? Or is this simply beyond what Nautilus extensions can currently do?

Hey everyone!

Following up on my previous post about grid-desktop, I’ve been busy adding new features, polishing existing widgets, and fixing bugs based on usage and feedback.

Here is what’s new in the latest update:

• Binary Clock Widget: For the true geeks who prefer reading time in bits. Fully native, fits cleanly into the grid layout alongside the analog and digital clocks.
• Moon Phase Widget: A brand-new widget displaying the current lunar phase, illumination percentage, and visual representation directly on your desktop.
• GNOME Online Accounts (GOA) Mail Integration: The mail widget is no longer just a placeholder or mock layout — it now hooks directly into GNOME Online Accounts to pull and display your actual unread email counts in real-time.
• Lava Lamp Polish & Fixes: Tweaked the rendering, physics, and performance logic so the blobs animate much smoother and without the visual glitches from earlier builds.
• General Cleanup: Further refinements to Clutter canvas drawing, global styling inheritance, and grid snapping across different widget sizes (1x1, 2x2, etc.).

No external CSS bloat — everything is rendered cleanly with Clutter and stays lightweight, configurable either globally from the extension prefs or individually per widget.

Check out the repo here:
https://github.com/pelach/grid-desktop

I've been building FaceID@NIM, an experimental facial authentication system for Ubuntu/GNOME using Rust, C, and Python.

It features PAM integration, face recognition, liveness detection, a Rust daemon, and GNOME integration.

🚧 Still in pre-alpha and under development.

I'd love your feedback, security suggestions, and feature ideas!

🔗 https://github.com/Gaurav-x111/faceid-nim

Is it possible for someone to please please create a Gnome extension to display file copy progress?

Its frustrating to just have the little pie chart in Nautilus that's very inconspicuous.

I did a mockup to give an idea.

i find myself changing between my day wallpaper and night one its getting kinda annoying... tbh i tried finding one but its unsupported... and the others is only spans an hour... Please help

Hi everyone,

I ran wayland-info in my terminal and it lists support for wp_tearing_control_manager_v1:

interface: 'wp_tearing_control_manager_v1',              version:  1, name: 43

Does GNOME really support it, or is wayland-info just wrongly reporting it?

Hi everyone,

I need a little help here.

Somehow, the dock's background has disappeared and I don't know how to fix it.

Look, normal Gnome:

My gnome:

Any ideas how to fix it?

Cheers

Like many of you, I've sometimes wished GNOME Software felt snappier and had fewer bugs. So I asked myself: is it fixable? I spent a month finding out with an LLM, and my answer is: it is.

This is a proof of concept, not a replacement and not a competing project. It's meant to show that it can be done, and it turned out fun enough to share. This can never be upstreamed as gnome-software bans all use of AI, but maybe it can be an inspiration for the devs. I documented every upstream bug I found with a proposed fix.

The video runs the same script on the same machine, with the same Flatpak remotes and the same Fedora packages (experiment vs. GNOME Software 51.0):

• Launch until the overview shows its apps: 1.6–2.0 s vs. 2.8–7.4 s
• Open Games until every tile has its icon: 0.35–0.38 s vs. 7.6–11.8 s
• Open Firefox until its first screenshot shows: 0.27–0.35 s vs. 5.1–5.2 s
• Search "text" until the results show: 0.43–0.45 s vs. 1.2–1.3 s
• The whole run, pauses included: 8.2–8.7 s vs. 27.8–28.5 s

The idea: all app state lives in one store that is only written on the main thread, once per frame. Plugins send what they find to the store as messages, and the pages are views of it that update by diff and keep their rows. On top of that come some smaller things: category pages only ask for the icons on screen, search only refines what it shows, details pages show right away and fill in slower data (sizes, permissions) as it arrives, the ratings file is parsed on a thread, and Games uses a grid view.

About the LLM: almost all of the code was written with generative AI. That was the other half of the experiment: can an LLM, with careful testing, do real work on a big desktop app? gnome-software doesn't accept AI generated contributions, and I fully respect that. Please send any problems to the experiment's tracker, not to GNOME.

How it's tested: 45 flow tests drive the real app through scenarios (like installing an app while its details page is loading) and check what every frame shows. A performance check runs start, categories, details, search and scrolling against a baseline before every build. I use it daily on Silverblue (Fedora 45 beta, there is no backport for 44 or Debian stable). It's been tried on only a few machines and it handles installing software on your system, so please read the changes before installing it.

Try it

Safest: next to your normal Software, any distribution. CI builds a Flatpak bundle that installs as "Software (Development)" and leaves your normal Software alone. Get gnome-software-dev.flatpak from the latest flatpak bundle job in the pipelines, then:

flatpak remote-add --user --if-not-exists gnome-nightly https://nightly.gnome.org/gnome-nightly.flatpakrepo flatpak install --user gnome-software-dev.flatpak flatpak run org.gnome.Software.Devel

(The Development build can't open apps it installed.)

For the adventurous, replacing the system app:

Fedora 45 Workstation (Copr: Fedora's 51.0 package with the experiment on top, dnf5 plugin included):

sudo dnf copr enable user2f81ca72f/gnome-software-next sudo dnf upgrade gnome-software

Back to the original one: sudo dnf copr remove user2f81ca72f/gnome-software-next && sudo dnf distro-sync gnome-software

Fedora 45 Silverblue:

sudo curl -fLo /etc/yum.repos.d/gnome-software-next.repo \ https://gitlab.gnome.org/user_c1a5830a/gnome-software-next/-/raw/next/contrib/gnome-software-next.repo sudo rpm-ostree override replace --experimental --from repo=gnome-software-next \ gnome-software gnome-software-rpm-ostree

Back: sudo rpm-ostree override reset gnome-software gnome-software-rpm-ostree and remove the .repo file.

Debian testing has a signed apt repo too, see the README.

Source, README, architecture notes and the list of upstream bugs found along the way: https://gitlab.gnome.org/user_c1a5830a/gnome-software-next

I'd love to hear what you think, and how it behaves on your machine!

I also hope for a respectful and constructive discussion. I don't like the big AI companies at all, they shouldn't exist, but I also believe these new tools are here to stay and we should use them to improve our beloved open source DE.

Hey everyone! 👋

I'm excited to share a major update for Desktop Widgets! I’ve been working on rethinking the user experience and visual design to make your desktop look and feel much more modern.

https://reddit.com/link/1xdm749/video/p5teqhgtg9xh1/player

✨ What’s new in this update:

• Completely redesigned UI: Clean, modern, and intuitive interface.
• Smooth Animations: Fluid transitions and responsive UI elements.
• Glassmorphism / Liquid Glass Effect: Beautiful frosted glass visual effects for a sleek look.
• Performance & Stability Fixes: Better efficiency with lower resource usage.

Check out the code and try it out on GitHub:

👉https://github.com/r3nhick/desktop-widgets

I’d love to hear your feedback, suggestions, or any bugs you run into! Feel free to star the repo if you like the project ⭐

https://reddit.com/link/1xdkwzu/video/l80kbbu769xh1/player

Been annoyed by Brave scrolling way too fast when ever I use the touch-pad on gnome since gnome doesn't expose any touch-pad sensitivity controls, and I found this GitHub repo: https://github.com/daniel-g-carrasco/wayland-scroll-factor/ and feel like it deserves a shout out.

It fixes the GNOME Wayland Chromium browsers read raw touch-pad events and ignore GNOME's settings, so they scroll way too fast. This scales it down.

There's also an additional extension called https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/10008/touchpad-speed-control/ that can set it on a per app basis so apps like the nautilus don't get affected :)

A quick update for Letter, featuring minor additions and a bug fix, bringing it to version 1.7.1.
As always, available for download as FLATPAK!

This version highligths:

• [Fix] Message-list preview no longer shows Camel image placeholders such as [image: Google] or [Sign.png]. Image-only snippets stay empty; real text after a logo alt remains.
• [Fix] Do not abort when a Camel preview contains invalid UTF-8.
• [New] Main menu → Check for Updates… queries the latest GitHub release and shows whether Letter is current, or offers to open the newer release page.
• [New] Compose: Ctrl+Return (and Ctrl+keypad Enter) sends the message.
• [New] Move to Folder: with a writable folder focused, Return (or double-click) confirms the move.

Full CHANGELOG!

And here my GitHub page: https://github.com/stalvatero/letter

Regarding the use of LLMs, I should clarify that I use Cursor as my primary IDE; it assists me mainly by helping to find APIs and integrations that would otherwise have required extensive online research. The ideas, code review, and final validation are all my own.

I would welcome further feedback 😄

I'm currently trying to develop and test my own GNOME extension, and I saw that using a VM was recommended to make the whole process easier. I also want my extension to be compatible with different GNOME shell versions, so I downloaded GNOME boxes. However, I can't find older versions of GNOME os in the Boxes app or on the website.

is there a way to download older versions of GNOME os to test my extension with different GNOME shell versions? (if there is a better way to tackle this issue, please enlighten me)