Hi, I’ve been having a strange issue for a few days now: my Activities button somehow broke. I have no idea how or why. I just know it has nothing to do with extensions or icon themes. I even enabled and disabled all extensions for testing and tried a different icon theme – nothing changed. The second desktop always appears broken!
Does anyone know a solution to fix this?
I don’t know the exact reason, but you could try just disabling all extensions to see if it fixes it and then turn them back on one by one.
I already mentioned that I did that — but I repeated the process: disabled everything again, then did a reboot, and suddenly everything was working again. I re-enabled the system extensions, rebooted — that worked too. Then I turned on each user extension one by one, always with a reboot. That’s how I found the culprit: Top Bar Organizer. I’ve been using that extension for a long time without any issues, so I didn’t expect it to be the problem. But after uninstalling it, everything worked again.
This is exactly what I really hate about GNOME: as helpful as extensions are, the whole system is just so buggy. I wish GNOME would finally reintroduce at least the basic features — even if they’re disabled by default. But shifting all the responsibility to the community just annoys me.
@hanthor Thanks anyway for your help.
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@Alex_S I absolutely love GNOME - there are no other DE that have the features and display minimalism for which I am looking.
But, I hear you about the extension architecture choices. It is quite disappointing for an otherwise brilliant piece of software.
This is what I believe to be the root cause - a weird design decision:
I found this while writing an extension myself recently.
GNOME Shell extensions can use or modify anything described above, much like GNOME Shell’s JavaScript itself. Once an extension is loaded and enabled, it effectively becomes a part of GNOME Shell.
At one point during the development process I introduced a nasty race condition that prevented me from logging in! It had my machine so CPU bound the only way to recover was to boot from an external drive and remove the extension from the ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions dir.
With that in mind, I would advise:
- do not take the decision to install / enable any extension lightly
- keep the # of extensions as small as you can - they become a PART of GNOME itself
- make sure you are sure that you can really trust any extension you install
- if you do not have the skills to perform an audit of the code - just say NO; do not install extensions
- I have all the pre-loaded
bluefinextensions turned off - I only run 2 that I have either customized or written myself
Please be aware. And good luck.
Thank you for sharing your experience.
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