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Comment by nottorp | Hacker News Reader

Hey does that mean they'll use "AI" to allow users to customize the desktop environment again?

You can do this by vibe coding extensions, and it appears many people are doing this. Ironically this probably makes GNOME the easiest DE to customize at this point.

> GNOME the easiest DE to customize at this point.

It's not even false, you do know that KDE exists

KDE cannot be modified by extensions in the same way GNOME can. This is a fact. The problem is the extension needed to be written. They are trivial to vibe now. You can make them do whatever you want.

> KDE cannot be modified by extensions in the same way GNOME can.

I was pretty sure that was false. I did a quick check and found

https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/scripting/

https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/kwin/

https://develop.kde.org/docs/plasma/krunner/

Yes, you can do some light scripting or create your own plugins for specific apps (krunner). This is not near what you get with gnome extensions, which allow you to essentially execute arbitrary code in the shell’s main process.

The shell got a lot of hate for being written in gjs, but you won’t get that kind of functionality from a shell written in a compiled language.

You can just vibe code changes to the DE, so at this superficial level Gnome remains as hard to customize as before

Not really. That would require re-compiling, ensuring binary compatibility with the rest of the system, etc. GNOME extensions are just scripts injected into the main process.

No - non-customizability is a design goal of the GNOME desktop, since they want the experience to be identical for everyone.

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