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Notes on GNOME

GNOME is one of the most popular desktop environments available, and while it's not my favorite, I do use it on my laptop, a Framework 12 two-in-one, for its simple and effective two-in-one and touch features (and because KDE Plasma rarely ever wanted to let auto-rotation work correctly). It's more similar to MacOS in its look and feel as opposed to KDE's Windows-esque look and feel, and in most cases it's really up to personal preference. GNOME ships in some of the largest distributions of Linux, such as Ubuntu, so it's a very common pick. I have had some issues which I'll highlight here.

GNOME Shell Extensions disabling moust inputs/desktop icons

This was one of the most infuriating bugs I've encountered using Linux, and it's thankfully an easy fix. What happens is after logging into GNOME (Wayland), the dock becomes invisible, and mouse clicks in most cases do nothing. I was still able to mouse/touchpad over the invisible docked packages, and click once to open them, but was unable to click anything - including exit - after that. Even ALT + F4 didn't work if I recall correctly. Logging out to switch desktop environments didn't work either, so I had to completely reboot the system.

The solution was thankfully simple, and could be done in KDE, or GNOME itself if I opened my terminal emulator before everything went totally unresponsive. In the terminal, input:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell disable-user-extensions true

to fully disable every installed extension, then logout, and login. From there, it's as simple as opening the GNOME Shell Integration in your browser and finding the problem extension. It's a slow and annoying process, but you'll slowly and surely find it. In my case, I believe it was Text Scaler, although I believe I was also enabling/disabling plugins a few at a time, which in hindsight makes troubleshooting a bit tricky since now I'm unsure if this was truly the culprit - don't do what I did. I'm fairly certain it was this, though.

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