I wanted my GNOME desktop to feel a little like the macOS Tahoe widgets, and I was tired of juggling a separate tool for my ASUS laptop, so I built Gnomo Maestro. "Gnomo" is Italian for gnome, and a maestro conducts the orchestra: the little gnome that runs your desktop.
It is one GNOME Shell extension made of parts you can turn on or off:
- Laptop: power modes, battery charge limit, CPU power limits, turbo boost, fan curves you can drag, keyboard lighting, GPU temperature and power limits, refresh rate, and a System view with your hardware details. On my ASUS it replaces G-Helper.
- LM Studio: the loaded model and what it is doing, load and unload models with the memory each needs, and a quick chat.
- Clipboard history on Super+V: texts and images, search, pinning.
- Screens on Super+P: PC screen only, duplicate, extend, second screen only, like Win+P. It stay open until you choose, which helps on laptops whose display key sends Super+P and lets go at once.
- Desktop widgets: a system monitor, a clock and your tasks (Google Tasks through Online Accounts).
Every pane is real blurred glass: a shader over the wallpaper, or over what is behind the pane, that bends the edges like a lens. It follows light and dark mode.
The hardware settings go through a small system helper, since only root may change them. It knows a fixed list of settings, checks every value against the range the hardware reports, asks polkit before changing anything, and only shows what your laptop actually has. ASUS, Lenovo, ThinkPad and Dell are covered where the kernel exposes the controls.
A few honest notes:
- GNOME 50 only. I tested it on my own laptop (ASUS, Intel and NVIDIA, Ubuntu 26.04); other hardware is tested against simulated sysfs, so reports are very welcome. The System view has a "Copy Report" button for exactly that.
- I wrote it with a lot of help from an AI coding assistant. I reviewed and tested everything on my machine, and the root helper has its own test suite that runs on every push.
- I made this for myself and I am quite busy, so I cannot promise regular maintenance. Issues, forks and pull requests are very welcome, and if you want to take a part further, please do.
GPL-3.0: https://github.com/Sestiano/gnomo-maestro
(Wallpaper in the screenshots: "Big Dipper" by mizuno-as, CC BY-SA 4.0.)