The good (and probably the best) thing about Gnome Shell is that you can easily extend its functionality with extensions, and we have already shown you some of the best ones in a previous article. What is not immediately obvious is how to actually update your installed extensions and how to get notified when there are updates.
If you install extensions through your distributions’ package manager, updates will be passed on when you update the system. However, for those who install extensions through the GNOME Extensions website, there is no built-in way to get notified when there are updates for the extensions you have installed.
This problem is solved by installing another extension, Extension Update Notifier, which simply informs you when an update is available for any of your installed extensions.
Once you have it installed, you can customise how often it should check for updates by launching the settings from the GNOME tweak tool.
To actually update an extension, visit the GNOME Extension website in a compatible browser, such as Firefox or GNOME Web (Epiphany), and click “Installed Extensions” on the top navigation bar.
You will see a list of all the extensions you have installed on your computer and options to enable, disable, configure or remove them next to each one.
If updates are available for an extension, it will have a green button next to it. Click this button.
Finally, click “install” to download and install the update.
Wrap Up
That’s all there is to updating GNOME Shell extensions. I would have loved a more intuitive way to update all extensions with one click, via the GNOME Software Center for example, but this does not exist at the moment.
If you know of a better way to update GNOME extensions, do tell us about it in the comments section below.
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