What you will need to do:
- To keep an eye on updates; look at what's updating before you tell updates to go ahead. If it's a Gnome update, pull out of the update by confirming with "No" when prompted to confirm.
- To back up your ~/.local/share/gnome-shell folder to somewhere (I put mine in "Documents"). When you do this, just copy the folder to the backup source - then delete all extensions in your ~/..local/share/gnome-shell/extensions folder. Delete all user themes for gnome-shell that you have, too.
- Refresh your desktop with Alt+F2, type in "r" and hit the enter key.
- Then, go ahead and do your updates/upgrades
- Logout/in
- Do NOT have any other programs open, except your file manager for the next step.
- You'll need a split pane in your file manager, one side opened to the extensions folder in the backup you made, the other to ~/.local/share/gnome-shell. Keep this open, to these folders, through the whole process.
- Add one extension back, press Alt+F2, then r. Check to make sure everything works, in particular gnome-tweak-tool. If it does, repeat the process with the next extension, and so on and so forth. Each time you press Alt+F2 and then r, actually load gnome-tweak-tool, and make sure there are no orange exclamation marks by the extension, and that nothing crashes by adding it. If it does, you know which extension to delete from the gnome-shell/extensions folder, and put in the Wastebin.
- Do the same with any gnome-shell user themes, put them back in the root /gnome-shell folder.
- It is a good idea to regularly back up this folder, in case of crashes, updates/upgrades, etc.
- If you have any extensions which no longer work, or are in an orange exclamation mark, go to http://extensions.gnome.org/ in Firefox and see if there are any updates to those extensions, or if there are others that do the same thing that might suffice.
- That is all.