The GNOME.org Extensions hosting for GNOME Shell extensions will no longer accept new contributions with AI-generated code. A new rule has been added to their review guidelines to forbid AI-generated code.
Due to the growing number of GNOME Shell extensions looking to appear on extensions.gnome.org that were generated using AI, it’s now prohibited. The new rule in their guidelines note that AI-generated code will be explicitly rejected
This is Gnome we’re talking about here, they don’t GAF if extensions work or not. They’ll break them tomorrow if they feel like it.
Contrary to uninformed opinions, they do try their best: https://gjs.guide/extensions/overview/updates-and-breakage.html
they say they do is not the same as they do. Find me someone who isn’t them who says the same thing
You’re literally looking at a post that is a result of that effort… The human review process exists to try and reduce GNOME Shell extensions that could potentially break the shell. The link I posted details other steps as well, but of course you didn’t bother reading that. And again, it’s impossible to never break extensions because extensions are just scripts that monkey-patch the GNOME Shell process. Trying their best is all they can do.
With how Reddit and Lemmy react to GNOME, you would think GNOME killed their dog or something.
I’ve used Gnome on and off for about a quarter century. There have been devs with very popular extensions that have sworn off Gnome because of their attitude towards breaking extensions. So if they’ve suddenly become concerned about breaking things people rely on to make Gnome marginally usable after Gnome itself has removed popular features, then that’s a recent trend. So pull the other one.
Of course there are extension devs who left GNOME due to the lack of a stable API. But they were all looking for something that was inherently not possible with how extensions work in GNOME. I can’t blame them, “extensions” is a misnomer in this case after all. It’s actually more like userscripts being applied on a web page in a browser.
If possible, take the time to read the link in my earlier comment, it should clear up a lot of misunderstandings about “GNOME devs intentionally breaking extensions” as most people seem to think of it as.
Given how extensions work (monkey-patching), it’s actually really impressive that most extensions haven’t really broken since GNOME 45 and the steps taken by GNOME to that end are impressive. Even the human review being discussed here is part of that, it’s exactly because an extension can literally bring down a user’s shell (also similar to how a web page can crash due to a userscript), so they’re trying to reduce the chances of that happening.
GNOME has always had a bit of a communication problem. They’re working on it. But I promise you, they’re all wonderful folks trying their best, even if they fail to convey that well sometimes.
Oh come on, Gnome 45 was only 2 years ago. I guess we’ll see how extensions go then, but I’m not holding my breath. I wouldn’t waste my time on building anything for Gnome at this point. I abandoned Gnome at the garbage-collector BS where they blamed extension devs for the memory leak then used the big hammer solution.
In the meantime:
Mar 2024: https://felipec.wordpress.com/2024/03/18/stupid-gnome-developers/
May 2025: https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-the-insanity-never-ends-f84a77ec3e13
The medium post is mostly about bugs (it’s software, that happens, report them or patch them) and distribution packaging issues (they seem to use Manjaro, so makes sense). Then it talks about design inconsistencies and all, which basically every Linux desktop is worse than GNOME with. Then it uses lines of code as a metric? Then it uses memory and compares GNOME to less capable desktops and ignores that KDE’s memory usage is not too far away. I’m sure there’s a lot of legacy code everywhere though.
I don’t know what to say about Felipe’s issue since he wants a behavioral change in a library and he’s mad that the GNOME devs aren’t making that change.
That said, all these desktops rely on GNOME components, so idk why they have such an attitude specifically towards GNOME. It’s just software, don’t get too heated over it.