Rounded corners are something most modern OSes integrate nowadays. Round corners are achieved by using a simple border radius, in short, a circle to mask off a sharp corner.
Even though it’s very much a matter of taste, round corners give an OS a more modern feel by communicating a sense of openness, user-friendliness, and overall simplicity.
But, what if you want to ensure that all your apps have rounded window corners like most GTK4/libadwaita apps do? The answer couldn’t be simpler – you install Rounded Window Corners.
Not surprising, a GNOME Shell extension is responsible for this
Rounded Window Corners is a GNOME Shell extension that tries to “add rounded corners for all windows.” It works on pretty much all types of apps (including GTK3 and GTK4 apps), and it’s compatible with GNOME 40 and higher.
Even though it might seem rudimentary, there’s a bit of smart trickery going on underneath this extension. For starters, it uses a shader from Mutter to affect all window corners.
We should also point out that the TypeScript support for GJS is powered by gi.ts which is, by all means, pretty nice.
Things to love about this nice, little extension
We mentioned that the extension should work on most types of Linux apps, but what’s more impressive is that it also works on cross-platform apps as well, such as Electron apps, for instance.
Another great aspect is that you can pretty much drop all changes and revert your system to how it was by simply disabling the extension (turning it on/off).
Other noteworthy features include the ability to add apps to a blacklist menu (this ensures that these specific apps are not being affected), a quick switch to affect GTK4/libadwaita apps (that have rounded corners by default), as well as the ability to adjust the various neat aspects such as the border radius, border, and padding.
Probably the most impressive aspect of this extension is the level of customization it provides. For example, you can customize the drop-shadows component via easy-to-use sliders, for both active and inactive apps. You can tweak the spread, and the blur levels, as well as tweak the opacity, just to name a few.
Conclusion
Taking everything into account, Rounded Window Corners is definitely one of the best GNONE Shell extensions out there. It may not be the most versatile GUI tweak tool of this sort, but when it comes to providing you with a vast amount of control over how rounded your window corners should be, it gets the job done flawlessly.
