Extensions that target older GNOME versions will not work in GNOME 45. Likewise, extensions that are adapted to work with GNOME 45 will not work in older versions.
You can still support more than one GNOME version, but you will have to upload different versions to extensions.gnome.org for pre- and post-45 support.
I haven’t been through a Gnome update that breaks extension before. So this is a newbie question: is it best practice to remove any existing Gnome extensions before you do the update to Gnome 45? Or is it harmless to leave the extensions in place and just hope they get fixed eventually? The 3 I use are: Dash to Panel, Forge, and Pamac Updates Indicator. Thanks in advance.
In addition to the sage advice of @mbod some Fedora users disable all their extensions when they do an upgrade (e.g. from 37 to 38 earlier this year) as each new version of Fedora has the latest version of Gnome.
Arch has been waiting until the XX.1 release of each Gnome version to update the packages recently, so with luck all your current extensions will have been updated by then.
Thank you. Based on the good article you posted, it does look like the code change required to make the extension work is pretty minimal so I think your guess about fixes coming is a good one.
Are you letting the extension devs you use know on their Gnome Extension website or from their GitHub/GitLab accounts? Because some devs don’t ever read their Gnome Extensions website comments. It’s always best to submit any comments/requests to upgrade in their GitHub/GitLab accounts. That’s not just me saying that, it’s actually what the devs say themselves. Plus you can’t easily track comments on Gnome Extensions like you can on GitHub.
Well—I talked to the Dock from Dash developer on his GitHub account & had a very good discussion…He’s well on the way with the 45 extension…I’m waiting a couple of days to see if I get a response with the other 4 I left comments with on Gnome Extensions…If I don’t hear back, I’ll contact them directly.
Well–according to the info I quoted above…everything will not work. I’m betting anything that fmuellner does will work out of the box, but not so sure about anything else…This is going to break EVERYTHING that is not rebuilt for 45…
This is one of the most upsetting Linux news I have seen in a while, I have 20+ extensions and almost all of them will break after the gnome 45.1 update. Many legacy ones will never be updated by their maintainers. I will postpone the update: How to postpone Gnome update?. Anyone knows how tenable this is?
Here? The only way to postpone is to not update. Anything else would result in a partial update which isn’t supported and is very likely to cause issues sooner than later.
You may want to consider Debian for much more long term stable support.
As you’re probably aware. Arch Linux usually waits until the 4X.1 release before pushing the new version of Gnome to its repos. This gives you a bit longer to see whether enough of the extensions you use are updated to a Gnome 45+ compatible version.
Another option might be to start evaluating other Desktop Environments. I don’t know which 20+ extensions you are using, but it sounds as though you are changing the Gnome workflow to better meet your needs. It might be that another DE can do this with less need for customisation.
By the way: When I switched to GNOME a while ago, I made a conscious decision to use as few extensions as possible. These are then also extensions, with which I can get over it quite well, if they do not work for a while. If you feel forced to use GNOME only with extensions, you are definitely in the wrong place (IMHO).
