I admittedly can't quite match that:
[hamish@NERV ~]$ grep -a -m1 filesystem /var/log/pacman.log 
[2015-11-24 00:09] [ALPM] installed filesystem (2015.09-1)
[hamish@NERV ~]$ 

Rolling with openSUSE Tumbleweed!

Or rather .. tumbling? Okay, I'll show myself out.

I have a question: I like Tumbleweed, but I've always wondered: since rolling release distros are always on the cutting edge of (in this case) Gnome development, don't extensions break quite often, because they don't work with the newest Gnome version yet?
You seem to have several extensions running.

Quoting: DoctorJunglistRolling with openSUSE Tumbleweed!

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Breakage only happens on major GNOME release upgrades (eg GNOME 45 >>> GNOME 46), it generally doesn't happen on point releases (eg GNOME 46 >>> GNOME 46.1).

GNOME gets a new major release twice a year.

Whether one gets hit with breakage depends on various factors - how many extensions do they use, are the extensions still maintained (If they stopped being maintained, did someone else step in to do the work), how well are they maintained, did GNOME make some major changes that require a lot of work / time for an extension dev.

In part it also depends on a distro one uses - usually once a new major GNOME version releases, it usually takes some time for all the extensions to get updated, so If a distro someone uses gets the new GNOME release really early, chances are some of the extensions weren't yet updated.

Sometimes extensions keep working without having an additional update, and it's a matter of bypassing the compatibility check for a GNOME extension (you can do it globally for all extensions, or you can just edit the metadata.json file of a particular extension, and add in the number of the current GNOME version to bypass it that way).

This recent upgrade to GNOME 47 was particularly smooth, and all my extensions worked, albeit for some of them I had to install a github release (they weren't yet published on the GNOME extensions website), and for a few of them I had to edit metadata.json and add "47" to the list of GNOME versions.

Last edited by DoctorJunglist on 13 October 2024 at 4:42 pm UTC

Thanks for the long answer! I was asking because I've returned to Tumbleweed on my laptop and I was wondering about whether to use extensions. I quite like the vanilla Gnome experience, the only thing I really need are the AppIndicators in the top panel, for Steam and some other apps.

Quoting: DoctorJunglistBreakage only happens on major GNOME release upgrades (eg GNOME 45 >>> GNOME 46), it generally doesn't happen on point releases (eg GNOME 46 >>> GNOME 46.1).

GNOME gets a new major release twice a year.

Whether one gets hit with breakage depends on various factors - how many extensions do they use, are the extensions still maintained (If they stopped being maintained, did someone else step in to do the work), how well are they maintained, did GNOME make some major changes that require a lot of work / time for an extension dev.

In part it also depends on a distro one uses - usually once a new major GNOME version releases, it usually takes some time for all the extensions to get updated, so If a distro someone uses gets the new GNOME release really early, chances are some of the extensions weren't yet updated.

Sometimes extensions keep working without having an additional update, and it's a matter of bypassing the compatibility check for a GNOME extension (you can do it globally for all extensions, or you can just edit the metadata.json file of a particular extension, and add in the number of the current GNOME version to bypass it that way).

This recent upgrade to GNOME 47 was particularly smooth, and all my extensions worked, albeit for some of them I had to install a github release (they weren't yet published on the GNOME extensions website), and for a few of them I had to edit metadata.json and add "47" to the list of GNOME versions.