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How to Manually Install a GNOME Extension on Pop!_OS 22.04

29 Mar 2025

Installing GNOME Shell extensions on Pop!_OS (or Ubuntu) is supposed to be easy. Documentation says that there is an extension manager. But not all extensions are there. The Install button on the extension page also didn’t work for me because I wasn’t able to install gnome-browser-connector that replaced the chrome-gnome-shell package.

After trying several suggestions from ChatGPT I installed it manually with the following steps:

# 1. Find current GNOME version to download the corrent zip from the extension page:
gnome-shell --version

# 2. Create the extensions directory if it doesn't exist
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions

# 3. Unzip the archive to a temporary folder
unzip alttab-scroll-workaroundlucasresck.github.io.v4.shell-extension.zip -d ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/temp

# 4. Get UUID of the extension
vi ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/temp/metadata.json

# 4. Rename the folder to match the extension's UUID
mv ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/temp ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/alt-tab-scroll-workaround@lucasresck.github.io

# 5. Restart GNOME Shell on X11:
Alt+F2, type 'r', press Enter

# 6. Enable the extension
gnome-extensions enable alt-tab-scroll-workaround@lucasresck.github.io

What Can Go Wrong:

  • If gnome-extensions enable says “does not exist”, check that the folder name matches the uuid inside metadata.json.
  • Ensure your metadata.json has a matching GNOME Shell version, e.g.,:
"shell-version": ["42", "43"]
  • After adding a new extension folder, GNOME won’t detect it until the session is restarted.

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