Comment by donniezazen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by donniezazen | Hacker News Reader

I have never enjoyed the idea of extensions for essential functionalities like power menu. With release of newer versions of Gnome Shell every 6-8 months, extensions break. Like Firefox, there will always be some extensions not working. You have to log-out to enable extensions. I don't like to reboot or log-out my Linux box, not for trivial things like extensions. I only reboot when there is a kernel update.

I am still unable to understand where do they want to take notification.

I like both Gnome and Unity. Gnome Foundations and Canonical should be left to pursue their own objective goals as long as they don't destroy projects that are used by other Desktop Environments like XFCE, etc.

You don't need to log out to enable extensions, just reload gnome shell. Press Alt-F2 and type 'r' without quotes.

I actually don't even need to do this, they just enable immediately. (Version 3.6.1, if that's relevant.)

Extensions enable and disable without relogin at least since 3.2.

Like other comments, I don't need to reload or log out my gnome shell when adding an extension. But it's true that I used Shell only for the last 6 months, so I'm not really aware of the broken extension problem, but it's clear that it can be a huge probleme, especially because even though Shell is good, it misses some things out of the box that are really useful, like I said in my blog post.

What distro are you running Gnome on? I ran 3.6 on Archlinux and some extensions didn't come up automatically. For example, the gnome-shell-system-monitor doesn't apply changes without log-out (I am not sure about reload, never tried that).

I'm currently on Linux Mint, and before that I used Gnome Shell with Ubuntu 12.04.

"Power Off" is now a default option in 3.6. It seems like they're using extensions to get a feel of what the most popular feature requests are, then adding them to the default experience. You may disagree with it, but a hard number of extension installs is more to go on a couple blog posts.

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