As a reluctant Apple user, I’ve been testing the waters of Linux and specificlly GNOME for the past few years. While I miss the familiarity and maturity of macOS, I like the minimalism of GNOME and I’ve been incredibly impressed with how it translates to smaller screens like the MNT Pocket Reform. I even find I’m OK with the controversial decision to remove the desktop. Still, there remain a few rough edges, and places where I miss functionality from macOS. For those, I’m relying on a couple of GNOME extensions:

  • Alphabetical App Grid

    I’m one of those rare people who relies on macOS LaunchPad and carefully groups apps into folders. Unfortunately, it’s fiddly and tedious to manage the app grid—GNOME’s equivalent—so instead I allow ‘Alphabetical App Grid’ to simply keep it sorted for me.

  • gTile

    I’ve used Divvy for years on macOS to allow me to quickly position windows using hotkeys. After all that time, I have a few key combinations I just can’t do without and, while I can snap windows left, right, and fullscreen just fine out-of-the-box with GNOME (something Apple’s only just added native support for this year), I love being able to center a portrait window on screen. The UI is a little more fiddly than I might like, but ‘gTile’ lets me do exactly that.

I’ve also been enjoying using the built-in ‘Apps Menu’ and ‘Places Status Indicator’ which add menus to the status bar for opening apps and special folders respectively. I miss the Mac OS 9 days of having programs in the Apple menu and this is a nice and useful throwback.