Reliving the glory days of the GNOME 2 desktop is but a browser tab away – well, kinda. The personal website of Benny Powers, a software developer at Red Hat, is not a traditional vertical column of text. Nor is it a slop-soup of purple gradients, rounded glassy cards and monospaced datapoints (a ‘vibe-coded’ aesthetic everywhere right now). No, it’s an interactive GNOME 2 ‘desktop’. He built it after digesting an essay on how websites used to be weird and playful and unique. Looking at his own site, he decided it wasn’t nearly wacky enough, so restyled it to resemble […]
You're reading This dev’s personal website is a working GNOME 2 desktop, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Dynamic Music Pill, the blingy GNOME Shell extension that adds now playing track info, media controls and even real-time lyrics to your desktop, has gained some new options. “Like what?”, you ask… If you don’t want to see the name of the artists in the panel pill, you no longer have to: a ‘show artist’ toggle lets you hide it. The extension already has an option to dynamically hide artist labels if there’s not enough room to display it alongside the title. On that topic, when long artist names and track titles combine, the pill will scroll the labels from […]
Quick Lofi is a GNOME Shell extension that puts a lofi radio player in your top bar. If you’ve ever opened a new browser tab to load a “lofi beats to study to” stream on YouTube — lofi girl, perhaps – to act as an ambient backdrop to work to, the appeal will be evident. If not, all you need to know is that mellow, lyric-free, low-tempo sounds are reputedly ideal for focus. A wedge of research backs up the benefits of playing background music (or ambient noise or frequencies, including binaural beats) when studying. A 2022 study showed students who […]
A clutch of new features are available in Dynamic Music Pill, the slick now playing and media controller extension for GNOME Shell. The “big” new addition is lyrics support. When you listen to a track with synced lyrics in a compatible player, you can view those lyrics by opening the applet controller and clicking on the album art inside of it: The lyrics are shown in a freely scrollable widget, with the active line bolder in white for more emphasis. You can scroll up and down whilst tracks are playing. If you click a lyric line, your music player jumps […]
Pigeon Email Notifier is a GNOME Shell extension that does one thing: show a desktop notification when new mail arrives in your Gmail, Microsoft Outlook or IMAP webmail account. If you don’t want to leave a webmail tab open in Firefox, the overhead of a desktop email app like Thunderbird, or your provider doesn’t offer a desktop Linux app (like Fastmail and Proton Mail now do), Pigeon provides a set-and-forget way to still get new mail alerts. Desktop email notifiers have been around for a long time. I’ve written about many standalone tools, like Unity Mail, Popper and Mail Nag over […]
Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ships with two new extensions installed and active by default, both adding new search capabilities to the GNOME Shell Overview. The first new extension is Web Search Provider. This lets you initiate a web search on Google straight from the GNOME Shell Overview. ‘Initiate’ is the important term here as search terms made in GNOME Shell are not sent anywhere directly. Before you raise an eyebrow: this is not a revival of the Shopping Lens furore. That saw local file and app searches typed in Ubuntu’s then-Unity desktop piped off to third parties (anonymised, but still dodgy […]
The world isn’t short on keyboard-based Linux launchers. Albert, Ulauncher, rofi and GNOME Do (if you’re old enough to remember that one) are among those I’ve written about in the past. Rudra is a new spin on this old staple – albeit without the extensibility dedicated quick launchers provide. What’s different here is that it’s implemented as a GNOME Shell extension, not a standalone app. The developer of Rudra, Nark Agni, describes it as a “lightning-fast, keyboard-centric launcher […] designed for power users”. Though inspired by Mac apps like Alfred and Raycast, it is far less capable than those. To […]
Papers gains new PDF annotation tools, including ink, text boxes and improved form support, now available in GNOME Nightly builds.
Ubuntu's Yaru theme will closely follow the vanilla GNOME Shell design in the upcoming 26.04 release, as its developers aim to reduce the maintenance burden. 
The 2 Wallpapers GNOME extension changes wallpaper when apps open, letting you fake blurred window look in apps that support transparency – clever!
Control Spotify playback from top bar in Ubuntu using gSpotify, a slick GNOME extension that even changes colour based on the playing track's artwork.
Floating Mini Panel GNOME extension now has a vertical panel option, an orientation which feel up (a bit of) screen space on widescreen displays.
If you see the "unable to capture a screenshot, all possible methods failed" error when using GNOME Screenshot in Ubuntu, it is not a bug – but by design. 
Tiling Shell v17 is out with a handful of new options for keyboard-driven workflows, including shorts to switch between tiling layouts. GNOME 49 support also added.
The way to autostart applications in Ubuntu has changed, as the standalone 'Startup Applications' tool not included in 25.10 — don't panic; it's still possible. 
If you want weather information displayed directly on your Ubuntu desktop, the Desktop Widgets GNOME Shell extension is worth checking out. See why inside.
A new version of the GNOME desktop environment has been released with new default video and document apps, Lock Screen features, and more - exciting!