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odror

Member

Registered: 2015-03-17

Posts: 149

gnome 40 force install old extensions

Hi

When I booted my machine today my desktop environment was changed to gnome-40. My favorite extensions were excluded just because of version mismatch. Is there a way to force install the old extensions.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 24,307

Re: gnome 40 force install old extensions

You generally can't, GNOME doesn't have a stable API. All extensions need to be updated to be compatible.

IF you're sure that they would still work you can edit the metadata.json of the extension in question and add "40" to the list, but there won't be any guarantees they will work.

Last edited by V1del (2021-04-09 00:28:38)

icar

Member

From: Catalunya

Registered: 2020-07-31

Posts: 530

Re: gnome 40 force install old extensions

Many still work, except for their preferences panel, which needs to be ported to GTK4. You can give it a try.

bulletmark

Member

From: Brisbane, Australia

Registered: 2013-10-22

Posts: 690

Re: gnome 40 force install old extensions

The answer to your question is to type:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell disable-extension-version-validation "true"

But then be sure to not complain here when you experience various GNOME breakages ...

HCF

Member

Registered: 2016-04-10

Posts: 29

Re: gnome 40 force install old extensions

I did this for my clipboard and caffeine extension, and both work great with this workaround--YMMV

Open your extension's metadata.json file, e.g.

~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/caffeine@patapon.info/metadata.json

and amend/add the shell-version, e.g.

"shell-version": [
    "3.38",
    "40.0"
  ],

Then logout/restart. You may have to manually enable it, for me they came up straight away.

Might be a better solution vs enabling all extensions system-wide.

icar

Member

From: Catalunya

Registered: 2020-07-31

Posts: 530

Re: gnome 40 force install old extensions

For Caffeine there is a fork, Espresso: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4135/espresso/

sgtnasty

Member

From: US

Registered: 2020-07-27

Posts: 13

Website

Re: gnome 40 force install old extensions

For Caffeine there is a fork, Espresso: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4135/espresso/

this is awesome, thank you!