Are you tired of seeing the same GNOME extensions recommended everywhere? Do you want to discover powerful tools that most folks don’t know about? Well, here are nine criminally underrated GNOME extensions that could transform your desktop experience!
GNOME’s extension ecosystem is vast, but most articles focus on the same popular picks like Dash to Dock or Arc Menu. Don’t get me wrong, these mainstream options are solid, but there’s an entire world of lesser-known extensions that offer incredible functionality that more people should know about! These overlooked tools can revolutionize how you interact with your desktop, from advanced customization options to workflow optimizations that even experienced users haven’t discovered.
For the purpose of this article, I am using Ubuntu 25.04 running GNOME Shell 48. These extensions should work on other GNOME-based distros as well.
Open Bar
I’ve been customizing Ubuntu for years, and Open Bar is hands down the most powerful tool I’ve encountered. There are so many customization options that covering them all would demand its own article—way beyond what I can fit in here! Thankfully, the interface is fairly intuitive, and with a bit of tinkering, you’ll quickly figure out what each setting does.
The extension gives you complete control over your top bar’s appearance. You can stick with the default rigid bar attached to the screen, switch to a floating style, or divide each section like the clock and quick settings area into their own separate islands. You also get granular control over the color scheme along with the option to auto-change colors based on your current wallpaper.
However, what really makes Open Bar amazing is its ability to extend all of its theming capabilities to other parts of the GNOME Shell, including the Ubuntu Dock and the new GTK4 and libadwaita apps—something that’s been a real pain point for customization enthusiasts. The extension gives you a simple graphical interface to customize everything—which means no more messing around with CSS files or terminal commands that could potentially break your system.
Search Light
If you’ve ever used macOS and its Spotlight functionality, then Search Light is exactly that—just for GNOME. You press a keyboard shortcut like Alt+Space (to mimic Command+Space on macOS) to trigger a small search field where you can type in the name of a file, app, or setting and quickly launch it. And yes, it’s configurable to any keyboard shortcut.
Now, I know what you might be thinking—GNOME already has this with the Super key that takes you to the Activities Overview, which has a universal search bar! However, in the Activities Overview, everything gets zoned out to focus more on the workspaces, and you lose the visual context of what you’re working on! With Search Light, the search field pops up right on the desktop, and I find it more convenient.
This means that when you use Search Light, you can see all your active windows running behind the transparent search field for additional context—e.g., maybe you need to reference a browser tab while searching for a file. It sounds niche, but I find it genuinely more useful than GNOME’s default approach, especially from an accessibility standpoint when you need to maintain visual context while multitasking.
GNOME Fuzzy App Search
GNOME Fuzzy App Search is probably the simplest extension on this list, but also one of the most useful. By default, GNOME is super strict with your spelling when you search for stuff, but this extension makes it a lot more forgiving. You can spell settings like seting and it’ll still understand what you’re looking for and show you the app.
The extension works across apps, files, and system settings, making your entire search experience more flexible. It might sound like a small thing, but it saves you those annoying moments where you accidentally mistype something and have to hit backspace and start over. It’s one of those quality-of-life improvements that you don’t realize you need until you have it.
Astra Monitor
Vitals is probably the most popular GNOME extension for system monitoring, and I personally used to rely on it—that is, until I stumbled upon Astra Monitor and was blown away by the difference in data presentation. While Vitals gets the job done in a simple and straightforward fashion, Astra Monitor brings both style and substance to keeping tabs on your system resources.
What I love about the extension is its comprehensive yet customizable interface. You get real-time monitoring for CPU, GPU, RAM, disk usage, network stats, and sensor readings, presented through sleek graphs and polished visual elements. Of course, if you just want to see the RAM and network speeds and not clog up the panel, you can head into the extension settings and disable unwanted stats.
You can hover over the system monitor elements to reveal more data, or click them for a rich drop-down interface with detailed information. It’s comprehensive without being overwhelming, and the visual design makes it feel less like system monitoring and more like having a sleek dashboard for your PC.
Fly-Pie
Fly-Pie is hands down one of the most unique extensions I’ve encountered—and I mean that in the best possible way. It’s essentially a radial menu (a circular menu that looks like a pie) that you can trigger with a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Space by default). You can use it to launch applications, simulate hotkeys, open URLs, and perform tons of other actions. It’s the perfect tool for folks who want to enjoy the power of keyboard shortcuts but can never remember them—and prefer using the mouse!
Now, in my tests, it seems like the radial menu can potentially have as many items as you like, but I find having more than eight just makes it less intuitive to navigate. That said, you can have another radial menu inside the main one, creating a nested structure, and this can go as deep as you make it. As such, you can potentially pack in as many keyboard shortcuts or custom actions as you want, and have everything accessible with a few quick mouse movements.
Active development for Fly-Pie has stopped, but it’s still functional on GNOME 48 and 49. The developer has migrated the extension into a full-blown cross-platform app called Kando.
Tiling Shell
Window tiling is a must-have feature for me on any desktop, and I’ve tried a bunch of extensions to enable it on GNOME. This includes popular options like Forge and gTile, but Tiling Shell is the one that finally clicked for me! It’s essentially Windows 11’s Snap Layouts mixed with FancyZones, all wrapped into a single, polished extension that works reliably.
Once installed and activated, the extension creates an icon on the top bar from where you can select a tiling zone and the active window will snap in place. Alternatively, you can drag a window to the top of the screen, and it will show all the tiling layouts from where you can pick one to snap the window in that place. That said, my favorite way to tile windows is to hold Ctrl while dragging them and snap them into a highlighted zone.
By default, you get four layouts, which I believe should suffice for most people. However, you can create and edit your own layouts with the built-in editor, adjust gaps between windows, and configure everything to work seamlessly across multiple monitors.
Quick Settings Tweaks
I always hated how rigid GNOME’s Quick Settings panel was in the sense that it never lets you customize any of it or what settings you want quick access to. This is exactly the problem that the Quick Settings Tweaks extension solves. In fact, it not only lets you customize the Quick Settings but also the date menu. You can now remove the calendar area or the notification column if you find any of that redundant. Personally, I keep it as is!
What I do change is enabling media controls in the Quick Settings, because it always felt like that’s where it should belong. I also enable the volume mixer, which lets you control individual app volumes without diving into the sound settings for each of the apps. This means I can finally mute Discord while keeping Spotify playing in the background right from the Quick Settings!
Custom Hot Corners – Extended (CHC-E)
By default, GNOME has a simple Hot Corner functionality where if you quickly drag your mouse to the top left corner of the screen, it will trigger the Activities Overview. Now with Custom Hot Corners – Extended, you can extend this functionality and turn all four corners into trigger zones for almost any action—be it launching an app, controlling the brightness or volume, or even executing custom commands.
As an added accessibility feature, you can even extend the corners to include a specific edge. This means if you have trouble hitting the corner, as long as you hit a connecting edge, the set action will trigger. Speaking of which, you can assign multiple actions to a corner and trigger them with different actions. For example, quickly moving your mouse to the top right corner can open the Terminal; however, doing so while holding Ctrl can open the browser. You can even configure it such that scrolling the mouse wheel while the cursor is positioned at a corner changes the volume or brightness levels.
Honestly, it can be overwhelming at first with all the different options at your disposal, but once you configure it to match your workflow, it becomes this incredibly efficient way to control your desktop. It’s like having a personalized gesture system fully accessible just by using the mouse—similar to Fly-Pie.
Advanced Alt-Tab Windows Switcher (AATWS)
This one is for all the Alt+Tab users out there. The default Alt+Tab behavior is good enough—it lets you cycle through all the running apps on the active workspace, and that generally suffices for most workflows. However, if you want to access apps open on other workspaces, see window previews, and even type to search for open apps because sometimes there are so many open that you can’t find them—then you want to install Advanced Alt-Tab Windows Switcher.
Once enabled, you press Alt+Tab like before to get the window switcher. After cycling through all the apps, if you press Tab again, it will show you all the active windows on all the workspaces. You can also start typing while holding Alt to search for the specific window title. So, if you have a browser window open running YouTube, you can type YouTube and you’ll get the browser window. Furthermore, it also operates like an app launcher. While holding Alt, as you search for an app, AATWS will show the app icon. As such, if it wasn’t running, you can directly launch it from the app switcher.
There you have it—nine criminally underrated GNOME extensions to help you augment how you work, enhance overall quality-of-life, and heavily customize your desktop to make it your own! Do give these a try, and hopefully they might become a must-have extension for your GNOME desktop.
