Back to the GNOME

I've been toying again with Gnome 3 and I must say that I'm now bought by it's cool concepts. It still had it's quirks and annoyances but mostly are gone with extensions. I must say that it runs way faster now and It's a great help  to my workflow.

There are some (IMHO) Must have extensions for the shell:

Application Menu

Well nothing much, returns our old and dear apps menu. Useful when you don't want to type for your app.

Frippery Move Clock

Ok the clock in the middle is really odd, I'm just used to look for top right to see the hour. ( I must say that I love the calendar applet of gnome 3, having my Google Calendar appointments there is an amazing thing to have).

Media player indicator

Control your media player from the panel, really neat, displays cover art and quite advanced controls.

Minimum Workspaces

This SHOULD REALLY BE THE DEFAULT BEHAVIOR. Having dynamic workspaces sucks because you have to open each window in a sequence if you want to always have your windows in the appropiate workspace( which for me is: wp1 {text editor, IM}, wp2: {browser, terminal}, wp3{ Mail Client, PRoductivity app or FTP}, wp4 {Music player}) but with this you have the best of both worlds, you can have your default set of WPs and just add a window to the new one when your really need a new workspace. Lovely

Places Menu

The GNOME must have a places menu, if it doesn't it isn't GNOME. 'nuff said.

Removable Drive menu

If your computer isn't a rock without any external ports and devices, then you must have this one.

Skype Integration

Ok so, both cinnamon and gnome just screwed up this and now this extension fixes it, not having notifications for skype it's a job-destroying feature if you rely on skype for serious communication. This extension takes it a step forward anyway and makes the skype status indicator a real integrated panel for controlling your skype account.

Window Overlay Icons

Just adds icons to the thumbnails in overlay mode, so you know which app you're dealing with.

In conclusion, GNOME 3 default behaviour is still alien to me, but extensions make it useful. It's still hard for me to get used at not having a taskbar but I've found out that allows me to focus more on the current app, and I'm juggling through apps a lot less. I'm still switching back and forth to Cinnamon which seem to have a more sane envirnoment with not that much tweaking. But I can appreciate the distraction-free environment that Gnome 3 aims for.