Vanilla Gnome Desktop is one of my least favorite desktop environments, but with several extensions enabled it can be nice to use like my Voyager virtual machine. The entire Gnome data collection results are an interesting read, but the extensions section shows a similar realization from users, that it needs extensions. Also of interest is how few of the people that allowed them to track this data used Fakebook and some other online accounts. Raises the question, is the vanilla Gnome allowing extensions the way to go, or should a lot of this functionality just be included by default into the desktop environment?
gnome-info-collect gathered data on which extensions were enabled on each reporting system. This potentially points to functionality that people feel is missing from GNOME Shell.
Extension usage levels
When analyzing extension usage, we removed any pre-installed extensions from the data, so that data only included extensions that had been manually installed.
The vast majority of systems – some 83% – had at least one enabled extension. Additionally, 40% had between 1 and 5 enabled extensions, meaning that the majority (around 60%) had 5 or less enabled extensions.
At the same time, a substantial minority of systems had a relatively high number of enabled extensions, with around 25% of systems having between 6 and 10.
Number of Manually Enabled Extensions
Number of Responses
% Responses
% Responses With Enabled Extensions
0
421
16.84%
1-5
1058
42.32%
50.89%
6-10
635
25.40%
30.54%
11-18
341
13.64%
16.40%
19+
45
1.80%
2.16%
Total
2500
100.00%
100.00%
Extension popularity
The data included 588 individual extensions that were enabled. When analysing the popularity of each extension, we grouped the extensions which had similar or identical features. So, for example, “appindicator support” includes all the various status icon extensions as well. The table below shows the 25 most common enabled extension types, after grouping them in this way. Some of the extensions are included as part of GNOME’s classic mode, and we didn’t have a way to filter out those extensions which were enabled due to the classic session.
Extension
Enabled Systems
% Systems
Appindicator support
1099
43.66%
Gsconnect
672
26.70%
User theme
666
26.46%
Dash to dock / panel
579
23.00%
Sound output chooser
576
22.88%
Blur my shell
530
21.06%
Clipboard manager
510
20.26%
Caffeine
445
17.68%
System monitor
346
13.75%
Just perfection desktop
318
12.63%
Drive menu
310
12.32%
Apps menu
308
12.24%
Place menus
276
10.97%
Openweather
242
9.61%
Bluetooth quick connect
239
9.50%
Night theme switcher
208
8.26%
Tiling assistant
184
7.31%
Launch new instance
180
7.15%
Rounded window corners
158
6.28%
Game mode
146
5.80%
Alphabetical app grid
146
5.80%
Burn my windows
140
5.56%
GNOME UI tune
116
4.61%
Auto move windows
99
3.93%
Desktop icons
98
3.89%
Background logo
2
0.08%
As can be seen, appindicator support was by far the most common extension type, with 44% of all reporting systems having it enabled. Gsconnect, user theme, dash to dock/panel, sound output chooser, blur my shell and clipboard managers were all enabled in over 20% of the responses.
