The GNOME Foundation is thrilled to announce the GNOME project is receiving €1M from the Sovereign Tech Fund to modernize the platform, improve tooling and accessibility, and support features that are in the public interest.
This investment will fund the following projects until the end of 2024:
- Improve the current state of accessibility
- Design and prototype a new accessibility stack
- Encrypt user home directories individually
- Modernize secrets storage
- Increase the range and quality of hardware support
- Invest in Quality Assurance and Developer Experience
- Expand and broaden freedesktop APIs
- Consolidate and improve platform components
GNOME Extensions actually run in the gnome-shell process itself and can do most things that a builtin solution could offer.
That proves why they shouldn’t be part of GNOME Shell themselves. Offloading some (debatable) functionality to extensions helps keeping the core components reliable and maintainable.
Side note: there is also a DING implementation with supposedly better DnD support: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5263/gtk4-desktop-icons-ng-ding/