How to get rid of built-in gnome-shell extensions?

Support GNOME
1

Hello,

I want to remove those:
material-shell, pop-shell, apps-menu

Why?
Because:
gnome-shell[1474]: JS ERROR: Could not load extension material-shell
gnome-shell[1474]: JS ERROR: Could not load extension pop-shell
gnome-shell[1474]: JS ERROR: Could not load extension apps-menu
and because I will never ever use or need these extensions.

Is it safe to just remove the directories?
/usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/material-shell*
/usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/apps-menu*
/usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions/pop-shell*

2

These are local installed packages that are dependencies of other packages, so removing the directories might give you some issues, they can be uninstalled, that will trigger dependencies aswell.

example 
pamac remove gnome-shell-extension-material-shell 
Preparing...
Checking dependencies...
Warning: gnome-layout-switcher optionally requires gnome-shell-extension-material-shell: For Material-shell

To remove (2):
  manjaro-gnome-assets                  20201017-1  (Depends On: gnome-shell-extension-material-shell)  community
  gnome-shell-extension-material-shell  12-3                                                            community

Total removed size: 562.3 kB

Apply transaction ? [y/N] y
Removing manjaro-gnome-assets (20201017-1)...                              [1/2]
Removing gnome-shell-extension-material-shell (12-3)...                    [2/2]
Running post-transaction hooks...
Arming ConditionNeedsUpdate...                                             [1/2]
Compiling Community GSettings XML schema files...                          [2/2]
No schema files found: doing nothing.
Transaction successfully finished
3

No, remove the packages instead of the files. Manually manipulating pacman managed files is an exercise in futility, the next update will bring those directories back.

You’ll need to remove manjaro-gnome-assets package to do that. If it takes any of it’s dependencies with it, install the ones you like back.

 sudo pacman -R manjaro-gnome-assets gnome-shell-extension-material-shell gnome-shell-extension-pop-shell gnome-shell-extensions
2 Likes
4

Well, thanks for the hints.

I use pamac-manager and this tool shows me
that these packages are not installed(cannot be removed):
manjaro-gnome-assets
gnome-shell-extension-material-shell
gnome-shell-extension-pop-shell

Now I wonder why those extensions have (nearly empty) directories.
Content:
material-shell@papyelgringo/schemas/10_material-shell.gschema.override

For sure, I never used or tried nor installed these shells.

I found in the journal-log:
gnome-shell[1474]: JS ERROR: Could not load extension material-shell
Thats why I asked how to get rid of this shell (and pop-shell,too).

5

That’s not right. Did you already attempt to remove files? As already mentioned, don’t do that.

You can check the files of a package with pacman -Ql; i.e.,:

pacman -Ql gnome-shell-extension-material-shell

You can either reinstall to fix the issue or uninstall them if don’t want them.

6

$ pacman -Ql gnome-shell-extension-material-shell
error: package ‘gnome-shell-extension-material-shell’ was not found

As I said, I did nothing. Instead, I asked if it is safe to remove the directories because
of entries in app-grid-settings:

$ cd /usr/share/gnome-shell
$ grep -r materialshell *
app-grid-settings:[extensions/materialshell/layouts]
app-grid-settings:[extensions/materialshell/theme]
$ grep -r pop-shell *
app-grid-settings:[extensions/pop-shell]

7

Oh, I see now. That’s actually a leftover untracked file. I know why and well get that fixed so it’s not left behind. Yes, it’s safe to remove.

8

thank you

btw I found these entries in the file: /usr/share/gnome-shell/app-grid-settings

[extensions/pop-shell]
[extensions/materialshell/layouts]
[extensions/materialshell/theme]

As you can see, the name pop-shell seems ok
but the name materialshell looks fishy…

Care cosmetics: Name should be material-shell
(because the product name is material-shell usually used when searching, too:
for example grep -r material-shell * does not find the entries)

9

Not in this instance. org/gnome/shell/extensions/materialshell/ are where the extension dconf settings are stored.

10