482
New Rule Forbids GNOME Shell Extensions Made Using AI Generated Code
(www.phoronix.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2025
482 points (99.0% liked)
Linux
10805 readers
593 users here now
A community for everything relating to the GNU/Linux operating system (except the memes!)
Also, check out:
Original icon base courtesy of lewing@isc.tamu.edu and The GIMP
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
@uncouple9831
That person debugging that stuff, that’s who cares.
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.
extensions are just scripts that monke patch == there is no extension mechanism
Yeah basically. It's just called Extensions. As I said in another comment, it's honestly a misnomer.
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.
But if we talking about extensions, no one will debug your code. There like, 5 extensions that used consistently and others have 5-10 downloads. We have like, 5 extensions to hide top bar, cause each time developer just give up, so I don't really understand this "rule" and reasons behind it.
GNOME manually reviews every extension, and they understandably don't want to review AI generated code.
Jeez. Calm down.
Then do whatever you need to do to stop freaking out about other peoples' right to choose to not deal with LLMs.
Yes they actually review the extensions, you'll find more information on the blogpost from last week.
@uncouple9831 @imecth Because they care. Quaint old concept, I know...
@uncouple9831 That's how my Mastodon client works. You asked, "Why would they be reviewing code?" I gave you the answer.
@uncouple9831 If you really care about quality, it does.
in the case of ai generated code, that is almost always the case. People say "but I review all my pet neural network's code!" but they don't. If they did, the job would actuallydtake longer. Reading and understanding code takes longer than writing it.
"why would that be anyone but the original author?"
That is what i was replying to, and I replied to the intended comment
no, the opposite. The problem with ai pull requests is that in most cases whoever submits them does not understand the code and expects someone else to review it for them (that's if they are even aware of the concept of code reviews in the first place).
Yes it would be someone else. If the code looks good then it might last a long time, and it could even be expanded upon. One key point of FOSS is that anyone can change it, and if it's good, people will.
@uncouple9831
That would be any person trying to audit that barely functioning pile of poorly structured code someone left behind after finishing their contract or being fired, for example.