Desktop

Lies

Neither of these are “App Stores” in the way average people know them. You can neither buy or sell products in these so-called ‘stores’…

…yet.

The wording on those two screenshots above is both hilarious and sad. It’s very reminiscent of People’s Front of Judea or Slim Shady.

Anyway, here follows a bit of a moan about all this (the app stores, not Monty Python or Eminem).

Background

I have previously lamented on the following subject as a stream of tweets. The topic has been on mind mind again recently though. So I thought I’d revisit and expand my thoughts.

Back in December 2020 I wrote up my personal Must-Have GNOME extensions. It’s been nearly three years, two job changes, and a few Ubuntu upgrades, so I thought I’d take another look.

tl;dr:

What changed

Out

I no longer have these installed.

Sound Switcher Indicator

This used to crash a lot for me, to the point I’d go and look for it in the panel and it was missing. I figured if I don’t realise it’s gone, I probably don’t need it that much. Also, GNOME shell volume control has changed a bit over the last few years. It’s pretty easy to switch device now in the menu.

I appreciate many people already know how to do this, but I’m surprised how many don’t, or don’t realise what it does. Forgive me if you know about this feature of Google Chrome.

A little while back I managed to win two separate eBay auctions for 16GiB DDR3 SODIMMs to install in my ThinkPad T450. This took it from the previously installed 16GiB to the expansive 32GiB.

Then I opened Google Chrome.

I currently run Ubuntu 20.10 on my main desktop PC. GNOME Shell is the default desktop, and while it’s great, one very useful feature is the ability to supplement or alter the default behaviour with extensions and other add-ons. Ubuntu ships with a couple of extensions by default, but I’ve added a few on top, and this blog post details what they are and how to get them, in no particular order…