USBee

A GNOME Quick Settings indicator for USB and USB-C diagnostics.

USBee mounts a tile next to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Sound. The subtitle shows live charging wattage and link speed; the popover lists every attached USB device and USB-C port with a plain-English diagnostic per port ("Charging at 65 W (PD 3.0)", "Cable limited to USB 2.0", etc.).

USBee is the GNOME-side companion to the usbeehive daemon usbhived. The extension itself performs no /sys, udev, or subprocess access — all USB knowledge flows through usbeehived over D-Bus.

Screenshot

Status

Current release: v2.0.0. Pre-1.0 in spirit; the D-Bus interface with usbeehived is considered stable, but UI details may still change.

Requirements

• GNOME Shell 46, 47, 48, 49, or 50 (48-50 untested, only API-checked. Happy to take bug reports or success stories)
• The usbeehive daemon usbeehived running on the session bus

Without usbeehived, the tile renders an empty state explaining that the daemon is not running. The extension auto-recovers when the daemon appears or disappears on the session bus.

Install

USBeehived Daemon Installation

cargo install usbeehive --features=dbus
usbeehived --install-service
systemctl --user enable --now usbeehived

From extensions.gnome.org (recommended)

(EGO listing pending review — link will land here once approved.)

From a GitHub Release

1. Download usbee@bitcreed.us.shell-extension.zip from the latest release.
2. Install it:

   gnome-extensions install --force usbee@bitcreed.us.shell-extension.zip
   

3. Log out and back in (Wayland) or Alt+F2 → r (Xorg).
4. Enable it:

   gnome-extensions enable usbee@bitcreed.us
   

From source

git clone https://github.com/abrauchli/usbee.git
cd usbee
gnome-extensions pack usbee@bitcreed.us --extra-source=src --extra-source=icons --force
gnome-extensions install --force usbee@bitcreed.us.shell-extension.zip

Then log out / back in and enable as above.

Preferences

Open via the Extensions app or:

gnome-extensions prefs usbee@bitcreed.us

Per-port mute preferences for CapabilityDegraded notifications are persisted in the GSettings schema us.bitcreed.usbee.

Repository layout

• usbee@bitcreed.us/ — the actual extension code. This is what ships.
  • extension.js, prefs.js — lifecycle entry points
  • src/ — tile, popover, D-Bus client, store, notifier, icon mapping
  • schemas/ — GSettings schema
  • po/ — translations (English-only for v1)
• .planning/ — internal planning artifacts (ADRs, phase plans, research). Not part of the published extension. Useful for understanding why the code looks the way it does.
• CLAUDE.md — contributor / AI-assistant guide. Includes the release process.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. See LICENSE.

Related projects

• usbeehive — the daemon that owns all USB / /sys / udev knowledge and publishes org.usbeehive.Devices2 on the session bus.
• WhatCable — the macOS menu-bar app USBee is conceptually modeled on.