 One of my biggest problems with GNOME is its lack of customizability out of the box And you can't really argue with that fact if you want to customize GNOME You have to go through quite a lot of work now There is an argument to be made that you shouldn't customize GNOME at all And I know a lot of people use GNOME that way and that's fine You know it use Linux however you want to use it that seems to be the motto of this channel But for those of us who like to customize our desktops GNOME is pretty much a non-starter simply because it's so tedious to do so and it feels like every time you do it you're Fighting against the tide like we know that the developers behind GNOME don't want you to customize Their desktop environment and it feels that way every step of the way is a task This is especially true when it comes to extensions now if you don't know extensions are small pieces of software that allow you to extend the functionality of the GNOME shell and Out of the box if you're using vanilla GNOME extensions aren't even Available to you like you can't just go through and Install an extension out of the software center It just doesn't work that way and the way it does work is so oddly difficult and Just kind of insane that it in many cases discourages you from even installing extensions to begin with you have to Enable the functionality in the terminal you have to install a browser extension of all things Then you have to go to a website find the extension you want to download and then download it that way it feels Like a third-class citizen and that's just the way GNOME has almost always been since the introduction of extensions That's the way it's been so I was actually quite happy when a developer decided to change the way extensions work on GNOME and That just developer did that by creating a new application called extensions manager and that's what we're going to take a look at today now I have here a Just vanilla version of Fedora 35 and if you're wanting to run a vanilla version of GNOME This is going to be the best place to do it now to install it to the extension manager You can do so by either building it or using flat hub now for whatever completely Idiotic reason flat hub is not enabled by default on Fedora I don't know why like it doesn't make any sense flat pack is their darling and they don't install it by default But that's neither here nor there so in order to install extension manager you have to enable flat hub first and then you can actually go through and go to flat hub and You'll find this page right here Which I'll link in the video description and you can either hit install or you can copy and paste this into the terminal Just remember you have to have flat pack enable just remember you have to have flat hub enabled in order to install this and You obviously have to have flat pack installed as well So that's two prerequisites that you'll have to do in order to actually use this But once you have it installed, I just hit the install button and it came up in the software manager Once you have it installed You'll get something that looks like this now the first page is just all the extensions that you have Installed on your system out of the box and there are a few here Surprisingly, I didn't even know that vanilla GNOME came with any extensions already installed But apparently it does and it also allows you to enable or disable them Just like you would with the extensions app that you can download in the software center the difference between The extensions app that you download in the software center and this app is that you can actually go through and install GNOME extensions right here from the application You don't have to actually go to a browser You don't have to install a browser extension in order to do this That's how GNOME extensions should work. So for example, you can install user themes and it just install and it's installed If you want to install Let's just say we wanted to install dash to dock We could go ahead and install that and dash to dock is now installed and Enabled so we can actually go to the install thing and we find that these are the ones that we've installed Ourselves and they're installed We can also manage the settings just like you would in the extensions application that foot that you know, mix off makes and It's just the exact same settings panel So that is really all there is to this application and it's amazing like this is so good This is exactly the way extensions should work in GNOME This application should be included in every GNOME install. It just should if and if it was like if This application came with every install of GNOME on Fedora or whatever destroyer you're using they would immediately remove half of the arguments against GNOME like like The biggest argument that everybody has just like I said it before is that GNOME is Uncustomizable out of the box you include this that arguments not there anymore Why isn't this default? It should be default. It's so good It will also go through and tell you what Extensions aren't available on your version of GNOME. So if you can't install it, it's not gonna let you so that that is already At least somewhat better than the website that used to be the mechanism for installing GNOME extensions because during that period you actually had to go through and choose your version of GNOME There was no way for that website to test your version of GNOME and find out what version it was Unlike this this knows exactly what version of GNOME you're using so it can tell you hey This thing is not available. You can't install it test so cool, right? And that's the way again it should work now there are some things where this could get better It could when you go into the page the screenshots will be hit or miss so like this one here has one But the user themes one doesn't have one I don't know what exactly picture that they would use to actually show you a user theme But it some of these don't have screenshots some of them do so that's kind of hit or miss also a little bit of Curation would be kind of cool So for example if they had like a featured section where they could feature New ones or something like all I have right now is the ability to sort things by priority or Recent or name or whatever and that's you know recent I suppose would be the the new ones but some kind of curation kind of like a store would be cool now The only way I could see that this it would actually be Superiorly improved would be for them to build this directly into the software center also sorry about the dog I can also see arguments against that building into the software center would kind of make the software center messy So what are you gonna do? So that is GNOME extension manager and it is awesome like seriously that makes GNOME a Million times better like it's just so good now the question is would it make me use GNOME? Maybe I'd be happier with GNOME knowing that I could go through install all the extensions that I need to install Right there from a native application without having to deal with browser extensions and all this stuff It's possible that I could live in GNOME even even more happily than what I did there during my last long-term review of it So we'll see if that ever happens, but just basically I think this is a game-changer And I really truly believe that it should be installed by default on every version of GNOME So that is it for this video if you have comments you can leave those in the comment section below Make sure you hit the like button and the subscribe button everybody who does that really does help the channel I do truly appreciate that you can follow me on Twitter at Linuxcast You can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast before I go. I'd like to take a moment to think with current patrons Today Devon Patrick Ope Marcus Meglin Jack time tool Steve H. I bring our Linux gear Mitchell Art Center Prevented Jeremy Sean Odin mark martini merit camp Joshua Lee J dog Peter a crucible dark band and six plaid ape and primus Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time