GameMode GNOME Shell Extension Finally Supports the GNOME 40 Desktop

GameMode GNOME 40

The GameMode GNOME Shell extension for Feral Interactive’s GameMode daemon for optimizing Linux system performance on demand has finally gained support for the latest GNOME 40 desktop environment.

If you’re an avid Linux gamer like me, you should know that the GameMode GNOME Shell extension developed by Christian Kellner has just been updated today to work on the GNOME 40 desktop environment series.

When installed, the GameMode GNOME Shell extension adds an icon on the system tray area of GNOME’s top menu bar to show you when the GameMode daemon is active or not. Of course, for it to work, your distribution needs to ship with Feral Interactive’s GameMode daemon.

I think the GameMode extension is very useful to see if your discrete graphics hardware kicked off when you opened a game. GameMode was initially created as a solution to fix issues with the Intel and AMD CPU powersave or ondemand governors, but it now supports optimizations for GPU performance mode on NVIDIA and AMD systems, NVIDIA GPU overclocking, I/O priority, process niceness, screensaver inhibiting, and more.

When the GNOME 40 desktop environment was released back in March, the GameMode extension ceased to work, like numerous other GNOME Shell extensions. Well, it took more than two months, but now the extension has been updated to version 5 and it finally works on GNOME 40 installations.

If you already have the GameMode GNOME Shell extension installed on your Linux distro, all you have to do to update to the latest version is fire up the GNOME Extensions app and click the update button. Alternatively, you can go to the GNOME Extensions website and update it from there when the update will appear (it takes a while to sync).

If the update doesn’t appear for you at the moment of reading this article, the fastest way to install the extension is to clone the current version from GitHub and install it manually from the command-line using the following two commands.

git clone https://github.com/gicmo/gamemode-extension.git
./make-zip.sh install

Once the extension has been installed, no matter the method you use, you must log out of your current session for it to work correctly. After you log back in to your account, you’ll notice the GameMode status icon the system tray area. Have fun!

Last updated 3 years ago

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