As someone who prefers a traditional taskbar to whatever you call GNOME’s default experience, heavy customization is in order.
First, we need the component that makes extensions work, as explained here. I’m on EndeavourOS, so the AUR comes in handy.
yay -S chrome-gnome-shell
Now we can go to extensions.gnome.org and add the browser extension. Once that’s done, we can enable all the extensions we want. “Dash to Panel” gives us the taskbar. I find “ArcMenu” essential as well. If you also hate the overview showing up every time you log in, “No overview at start-up” is for you.
There, job done! But we can do a lot more with extensions. Grab the “User Themes” extension and continue.
I’m using this theme. I installed it by cloning the git repo and running the install script. There are other ways to get themes installed, but basically they need to end up in ~/.themes so the extension can load them.
Get gnome-tweaks installed. This one is in the official repo for me, but I still use yay. You can do what you like.
yay -S gnome-tweaks
Then open up Tweaks and choose “Appearance.” Mainly “Applications” and “Shell” need to be changed here. If you got matching icons or cursors, you can set them here as well.
More extensions? How about “OpenWeather” and “Blur my Shell?” I also like “Dash to Dock” if you’re more into a macOS style dock.
With all that done, I can finally use GNOME without getting a headache.
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