 Although Genome is the most popular Linux desktop environment, I've never been a big fan of it. I was not a fan of the Genome 2 desktop environment, which reached end of life about 13-14 years ago. And then I especially wasn't a fan of the Genome 3 desktop environment because it was very crashy, very buggy. You had to install a lot of extensions for a lot of basic functionality. Those extensions sometimes could be a little flaky. So, Genome 3 was a bit of a hot mess, especially in those early years. But as the years went by, Genome 3 did get a lot better. But I think the best version of Genome has been the last couple of versions of Genome. With the release of the Genome 40 series, Genome now I think is fantastic. Even out of the box, even without installing extensions, Genome 40 out of the box is just a really good desktop environment for the average Linux user. And for me though, I'm a bit of a power user and I'm a bit of a stickler sometimes for details. I like a certain kind of workflow. And if I had to use Genome on a regular basis, here are the extensions that I would install. For this video, I'm going to use Manjaro Genome as an example because most Genome Linux desktop environments do extend Genome at least a little bit. There's very few that are going to ship a very basic vanilla Genome. But Manjaro only extends it just a little bit. You can see they have the dash to dock extension installed. But other than that, there's just some minor tweaks to it. For the most part, it's a pretty stock desktop environment. Right now Manjaro is on Genome 42.4. And again, this is how it would typically look out of the box on Manjaro. Now I'm going to install about a half a dozen plugins on Manjaro Genome and I'm going to make it look like this. Because this is a much more traditional kind of workflow that I'm used to with a traditional bottom panel with a whole lot of quick launchers with a menu system and with the clock being over on the right hand side and we've got your sys tray and some other information, some widgets going on here. Let me show you exactly the extensions I have installed to achieve this kind of workflow. The first extension I want to mention is the dash to panel extension because for me, I don't particularly like docks and I really didn't like that useless top panel that is the default panel on Genome because Genome, that top panel doesn't have much information in it. You really can't do much. And to be honest, there's so little information in that panel. All it contains is a clock and like your session button. Really, it's almost like the panel doesn't even need to be there if it's going to contain so little information. I like a fully featured panel with a menu system and with quick launchers and sys trays and maybe some widgets to display CPU, temp, things like that. And then that's what I get with dash to panel. I get a real panel with real information. I can move this panel around. It can be at the top if you like a top panel. For me, I like a traditional bottom panel, very similar to your traditional Windows workflow. And really without customizing dash to panel in any way, it sets things up again in kind of a traditional format where you expect them to be. No longer is the time and date in the center of the bar, which I've always found kind of weird. I don't know why GNOME has changed that, you know, moved the location for the time and date to be in the center of that top panel where when you use dash to panel, it just automatically moves the time and date where it belongs, right on the right hand side of the panel. That's just where naturally most people are going to expect that information to be. So dash to panel, definitely the first extension I always install if I have to use GNOME for a long period of time. The next extension I install is an applications menu of some kind. And there's a variety of menu extensions for GNOME. But the one I have been playing with here recently is Arc menu. Arc menu is really nice. It looks good. It's very traditional and you have your favorite applications. But if you want, you can go down to all applications and you get it broken down by categories. For example, if I wanted to go into the office category and see what is installed in the office category, I could do all of that. Also, it has quick links here for your file manager, bookmarks essentially for your file manager. So if I click on home, it's going to launch the Nautilus file manager in the home directory. So that is nice that all of that is built into the menu system. And I have the menu system Arc menu here, hotkeyed to the super key. So in your standard GNOME, obviously the super key is going to bring up your activities overview. But because we have this menu system here, there's no longer the need to ever go back to that traditional kind of GNOME overview. But of course, setting the menu to open on the super key, that is a subjective thing. That's just something a choice I made. If you want to, you can change that key binding to anything you want. For example, let me get into the extensions settings here. And Arc menu settings, let's get into the settings for this particular program. And you see hotkey options. So default when you first install Arc menu, it's going to be set to none. So it's not going to have a key binding associated with Arc menu at all. You can choose the left super key. And if you do that, then the super key, of course, let me get out of that pop up, will open Arc menu, which means the super key no longer does the activities overview for you. But if you wanted to also keep the activities overview, what you could do is you could choose a custom hotkey. For example, I did super shift enter to open Arc menu here with the custom hotkey. And now let me escape out of that. If I do just the super key, I would get the traditional kind of overview screen. And the overview screen still includes the dock, which is kind of annoying to have the dock in the panel. I probably wouldn't use that again. I would probably just go ahead and override that and just use the super key. The third extension I recommend installing would be the auto move window. What this is is you set window rules where certain kinds of windows always open on a certain workspace. So if I get into the extensions settings again, let me make that full screen. I have auto move windows here. If I go into settings right now, I don't have any workspace rules, but let's add one. So I'm going to click on the plus sign and then search for an application. And I'm going to search for let's it search for Firefox. I always want my web browser on my tiling window managers. I typically send them to workspace two. So just for consistency, I'm also going to do that here in GNOME. Firefox every time I open it should open on workspace two. So now let me close that out. And now let me open up, well, let me open up Nautilus, the file manager first. And then let me open up Firefox. Now Firefox did open. It's just launched on workspace two. Let me go super two to go to workspace two and there is Firefox. And super one of course brings me back super two. I also have some other key bindings. You just for convenience because I'm used to tiling window managers. Super shift C to close a window. Super one gets me back here. Super shift C to close that window. Now number four on my list of extensions to install is caffeine. And especially as a content creator, as a video content creator, oftentimes I'm recording my desktop. And when I'm recording a desktop, I don't want things like the screensaver. Or, you know, I don't want the screen lock to all of a sudden happen because a lot of times I'll be recording a screen. But if I'm not actually doing anything on that screen and five or 10 minutes, whatever the default time limit is set for the screensaver to enable itself passes, all of a sudden the screens going to lock in whatever I was recording. Obviously I'm going to have to now take the time to enter a password and get back into my screen. For example, like I'm recording this desktop today, I don't have to worry about the screensaver and auto lock or any of that happening right now because I have caffeine enabled right now. So caffeine is this coffee cup icon and you see the steam rising from the cup. That means caffeine is disabling all of the screensaver and auto locking mechanisms by default here. Now if I click on it, you see the icon changes. It's no longer a cup full of coffee with steam. Now it's an empty cup and you saw that it had enabled the screensaver. So now a few minutes passes. The screensaver will actually engage and lock the screen here. So the caffeine extension, not much to it, but what it does again, I think a lot of people will find useful. Another really simple extension that I find very useful is this little extension here. This is called vitals and it gives you vital system information. If I click on it, you get this little pop up with temperature, voltage, fan, memory, processor, system, network and storage. And there are settings that you can turn some of this information on and off. You can adjust how it calculates some of this information. So there is a lot to it. You can also turn on and off the icons with the information. Although I find that a little confusing to have numbers down here without an icon next to it. It kind of makes it difficult whatever we actually reading. So I leave the icons turned on by default with the vitals extension. So I would say those are my top five extensions. Dash to panel, arc menu, auto move, windows, caffeine and vitals. But I'm going to throw in a bonus. I'm going to throw in a sixth extension. Everyone that runs getting on probably should install. And that is the extensions list extension. And what this is, it's going to be a little icon that sits down here. You see the puzzle piece, click on that and there are all the extensions that are installed on this machine right now. And you can tell which ones are enabled, which ones are disabled. You have the little cogwheel icons next to those that have a settings system where you can adjust settings for various things. So we have the little bullet points next to all of the extensions that are currently enabled and running. You have a asterisk out to the side of some of these. I believe these are the default extensions. So this is what shipped out of the box. I did not install those particular extensions. They were just here with Manjaro GNOME. For me, this is my list of best GNOME extensions to transform the GNOME desktop environment into something quite special. And before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. And of course I'm talking about Gabe James, Matt Maxim, Emmett Mitchell, Paul West, Wyobald, Homie, Alex, Armor Dragon, Chuck Commander, Henry, Diokai, Lee, Marstrum, Nate, Erion, Alexander, Paul, Peace, Archon, Vador, Polytech, Realities for the less-read prophet, Roland, Steven, Tools, Devler, and Willie. These guys, they're my highest-tiered patrons. Over on Patreon, without these guys, this episode would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now, these are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work, I'm going to see more videos about Linux and free and open source software. Subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace, guys. This was fun. I should customize other desktop environments.