How to enable GNOME Classic?

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1

I’m moving some users from Fedora, where there is the GNOME Classic session. Some of them prefer it.

On NixOS, I tried services.xserver.desktopManager.gnome.flashback.enableMetacity = true;, but that enables a completely different thing. It’s using Metacity. FWIW I didn’t know that stuff was still maintained and used.

GNOME Classic is, however, just a session with a collection of preinstalled extensions. Quoting from there:

  • AlternateTab (alternate-tab@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com),

  • Applications Menu (apps-menu@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com),

  • Launch new instance (launch-new-instance@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com),

  • Places Status Indicator (places-menu@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com),

  • Window List (window-list@gnome-shell-extensions.gcampax.github.com).

Is there some NixOS support for that? Or some module that enables the optional classic session?

2

Those are all part of gnome-shell-extensions package installed by default with services.xserver.desktopManager.gnome.enable = true.

We do not have any module for enabling “Classic”, looking at the Fedora package, it is an optional part of the same component but we do not enable that.

3

So would it make sense to enable that option too? To have that option out of the box.

FWIW it’s officially documented in the GNOME docs for users: What is GNOME Classic?