If you remember that desktop picture widget for GNOME I wrote about last year, but found it a bit too basic for your personalisation preferences, you weren’t alone. Another user felt it could lacked enough flexibility, so forked and improved it. Picture Desktop Widget Remake improves on the original. It lets add multiple picture widgets to your Ubuntu desktop, and assign each one a different folder to pull images from, at random. Plus, you can set the size, position, border radius and aspect ratio of each widget individually. Each photo frame has its own on/off button in Preferences, so you […]
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An updated version of Dynamic Music Pill, the GNOME Shell extension to put now playing track info and lyrics in your panel or dock with animated flourishes, is out. If you’re prone some desk-side crooning, Dynamic Music Pill v1.3.0 brings two new lyrics provider APIs, BetterLyrics and BiniLyrics, with TTML parsing to provide word-by-word karaoke-style highlighting. If there’s word-level synced lyrics for the track being played, the extension shows them in the applet controller (click on the album art inside of to access the lyrics view) or the panel, depending on how you’ve configured it: Dynamic Music Pill can show […]
Dropbeat is a new riff on an old tune, a panel-based music applet for GNOME Shell that gives you an alternate way to pause, play and skip tracks in MPRIS-friendly Linux media players. Applets of this ilk are legion, and this panel applet doesn’t do anything that different to ones you may have tried in the past or currently use. But it does do some things differently. When installed, it adds a button to your panel that, when clicked, “shows a cool card to control your media player”, to quote the project’s GitHub. Dropbeat uses imagemagick to generate the blurred […]
The Desktop Icons NG (aka DING) GNOME Shell extension Ubuntu uses to put icons on your literal desktop, has been busy – it finished its port to GTK4, patched memory leaks and improved a few of its lesser-known features. The GTK4 port landed in v51.0.0, released this month, alongside early support for GNOME 51 (since that’s the GNOME version Ubuntu 26.10 will ship with in October). Prior to that, there were other, smaller in June with fixes for memory leaks and buffs to usability. DING’s GTK4 port – not to be confused with a separate GTK4 fork I covered back in […]
Night Light Scheduler is a new GNOME Shell extension that lets you control how warm your screen is throughout the evening (or day). GNOME’s built-in Night Light feature offers a customisable daily schedule, and lets you pick a colour temperature that’s more or less orange (which will reduce blue light emitted by your device’s display). But that temperature you set holds the entire time Night Light is switched on. It eases in and out at each end but it never changes in between. For most of us, the default behaviour is fine. It’s set-and-forget to a fixed schedule. But if […]
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 […]
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.
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.
If you want weather information displayed directly on your Ubuntu desktop, the Desktop Widgets GNOME Shell extension is worth checking out. See why inside.
Image, PDF and other supported file thumbnails will once again appear on the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS desktop, after nearly a year of not showing.