GNOME: IBM, GNOME Shell, and Session Restore

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 30, 2026

• GNOME ☛ Felipe Borges: You can now opt in to share your blog posts on GNOME’s Discourse

  We’ve just rolled out a new feature on Planet GNOME to bring our community discussions together! You can now opt in to automatically create a topic on discourse.gnome.org whenever you publish a new blog post.

  Having comments centralized on Discourse makes it much easier for readers to discuss your posts, while also ensuring that all interactions are moderated under the GNOME Code of Conduct for a safer, healthier space. It is also a great way to give your content a bit more visibility with the active Discourse community without any extra manual work.

• Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Dash to Dock v106 Added GNOME 51 Support & Explained Why “scroll over icon” Doesn’t Work

  Dash to Dock, the popular Gnome Shell Extension that brings out the bottom dock launcher out of overview, released new 106 version a few days ago.

• OMG Ubuntu ☛ Mosaic is an i3-style auto-tiling extension for GNOME Shell

  Mosaic brings i3-style automatic tiling to GNOME Shell without asking you to choose it permanently. Turn it on when you want windows to arrange themselves, turn it off when you want floating windows back. The extension works with GNOME 45 and up, adding a toggle to Quick Settings to enable the auto-tiling mode. When off, you’re in floating mode (which still has tiling features). Expand the toggle to access more options or get at Mosaic’s settings. It’s the on-demand nature that makes Mosaic more interesting as a tool.

• LWN ☛ Save and restore may be coming to GNOME [LWN.net]

  One of the features that users often miss when moving from X11 to Wayland is the ability to save and restore the position of windows between sessions. At GUADEC 2026, held in A Coruña, Spain, Adrian Vovk provided an overview of work that has gone into providing a platform-wide save and restore framework for GNOME. After two failed attempts at landing an API, he believes that the third try will be the one to succeed—though not in time for the upcoming GNOME 51 release due in October.

  I did not attend GUADEC in person this year, but I watched the video of Vovk's talk after it was streamed. The individual talk videos have not been posted yet, but his talk is available at 5:40 in the full video from day two of the conference. The slides from the session have not yet been posted.

  The idea behind the save and restore feature, Vovk said, is simple. A person is using their system and has applications open while working on something, then they need to log out of the desktop or reboot for some reason. When they log back into their desktop, they would like to restore the previous session: that is, application windows resume their previous positions and sizes, re-open the same documents, and so forth. Currently this is not possible in GNOME, at least not without additional extensions.