[WD-42]

A lot of us are happy gnome doesn’t support tray icons. We are sick of devs thinking their app is so important it needs a visual presence at all times. If I need your app I’ll bring it to the foreground, we have the technology.

Global shortcuts definitely a pain point with Wayland but the portals are making progress.

[aaddrick]

Yeah, I don't want want to take away from anyone. The COSMIC team is doing amazing and hard work. I started dev on claude-desktop-debian with Pop!OS COSMIC as my daily. We're just in a weird spot for that particular issue right now. In 3 years, it'll be something else. That's the nature of fragmentation.

While GNOME tray lovers and haters both exist, only one of those two groups is liable to submit an issue against my repo looking for help getting icons working correctly.

[jorvi]

> A lot of us are happy gnome doesn’t support tray icons.

A lot of us = very few people in total, apparently.

There's a reason Dash to Dock and AppIndicator are packaged by default on most Gnome distros and overwhelmingly installed on those that don't have it. Even Gnome itself has started development on a native systray, although in classic Gnome NIH fashion they either want to implement a new standard or are were even considering using the deprecated snixembed standard instead of using what 99% of Linux does :+)

(Technically they want it for pretty good reasons, but good luck forcing all Linux applications to implement yet another standard, especially the commercial applications)

[aniviacat]

> There's a reason Dash to Dock and AppIndicator are packaged by default on most Gnome distros

Back when I still had a need for it it was solely because some apps do not have proper support for missing tray icons (you can only fully close them via the tray icon), not because I actually like the feature.

I appreciate that GNOME tries to move on from this. Unfortunately it doesn't have the market control that Windows has, so not all app developers follow suit.

[hparadiz]

The tray icon dock/panel in KDE is fully removable. You can just delete it. So the opposite of that is also a thing. No one is forcing you to always have a visual presence of a program. Even Windows let's you hide tray icons forever if you want.

[amlib]

But then you run into the problem of apps assuming the tray icon exists or is visible, but isn't, leading to problems such as the program just disappearing when you close it's window with no way to reopen it (some do reopen when you try re-executing it, others do nothing or just spawn a whole new instance...) or even having no access to some function that is exclusive to the tray icon menu.

All these issues can happen in any platform, Linux is just the more annoying/unpredictable one, with GNOME taking the cake for being so obtuse. There is either a carelessness from the developer or the ad-hoc nature of those "tray icon" systems is to blame.

[JCattheATM]

> But then you run into the problem of apps assuming the tray icon exists or is visible, but isn't, leading to problems such as the program just disappearing when you close it's window with no way to reopen it (some do reopen when you try re-executing it, others do nothing or just spawn a whole new instance...) or even having no access to some function that is exclusive to the tray icon menu.

Can you name some that act like this? In 30 years I don't think I've ever seen that behavior...

[Postosuchus]

That's precisely what is wrong with the state of the UI for Linux. Instead of boring, long research into user habits, finger memory, and productivity, resulting in boring standards like IBM CUA or Apple HIG, we got a bunch of opinionated engineers who think that people using computers fall into two categories: wizards, who are happy to spend their life tinkering with config files and making various pieces work together - and a bunch of losers not worth developing software for...

(Until Microsoft had actively started fracking it up, sometime around Windows Vista) just like a Roman citizen landing up in any town of the Empire, one would be able to effectively and consistently navigate around, using both keyboard and mouse across most Windows applications. Everything worked in a boring, predictable way. Everything used standard API that provided the whole spectrum of UI capabilities.

With Linux, unfortunately, this was never considered ideal and instead we have a zoo of different paradigms and technologies (plus intense politicking of UI development). Which means, when something happens to work as expected without excessive ServerFault/ChatGPT trawling and config/gconf/dbus wizardry, it feels like a sheer delight and an exception rather than a rule.

[CamperBob2]

How do I bring your app to the foreground if I can't see an icon anywhere? I just installed Ubuntu for the first time a few weeks ago and genuinely don't see how people are supposed to use it, coming from a Windows/Mac background. How does a Linux user know what's running, without going to a terminal and running top?

The lack of desktop UI affordances in the leading "user-friendly" Linux distribution should be seen as a five-alarm fire by anyone interested in promoting wider Linux acceptance on the desktop. There are reasons why Linux can't get past low single-digit adoption no matter how badly Apple and Microsoft screw their users, and I'm sure the half-assed desktop UI is one of them.

[WD-42]

Did you try pressing the super key

[curt15]

Most desktop users aren't keyboard wizards.

[bigyabai]

> How do I bring your app to the foreground if I can't see an icon anywhere?

On GNOME? Alt-tab, super overview, or click the dock icon. It's literally not any more complex than multitasking on an iPad.

[rav3ndust]

if you're running ubuntu, and the app uses a systray icon, you just click on the systray icon. ubuntu has appindicators out of the box.

[kombine]

> We are sick of devs thinking their app is so important it needs a visual presence at all times

KDE Plasma allows hide selected applications from the tray and make those accessible in a popup window. The solution to this problem is not to remove the feature entirely, but actually implement it properly.

[c-hendricks]

Going a little further back to 2001 Windows XP let users do the same. They haven't been requiring visual presence for decades!

[jm4]

I don't like tray icons. What I like less is an app that runs in the background anyway when I didn't ask it to and that behavior is hidden. It's infuriating to "quit" an app and it's still there. At least gnome finally addressed that with the little background apps widget.

[MarsIronPI]

I still don't see what was so broken about X's security model that it warranted a whole new protocol (with its own problems that it's still solving 15 years later) instead of an extension to X11.