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.
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.
> 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)
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
> I don't know what the 'super' key in GNOME is, and don't care
This is like having someone tell you that they refuse to use an iPad because the home button confuses them. That's your choice.
I've used GNOME professionally for 7 years now, and I've taught kids to use it at robotics workshops. If you can believe it, many of them are unable to use macOS and Windows at all, because their school districts don't buy them laptops anymore. I'm sorry that GNOME isn't a carbon copy of your favorite OS, but it's not hard to use whatsoever.
So you really couldn't figure out what "Super key" meant, even with context? I feel like you are being hyperbolic. This isn't magical hidden Linux knowledge. Honestly, if not being able to find what applications you have running, and not even trying pressing the large button on your keyboard with the windows logo on it was so traumatizing, you might want to just avoid Linux entirely.
No, I didn't realize that the "Super key" was the Windows key, and no, I didn't think to try it. I never use the Windows key myself, because it's never needed. I'm either in a DOS or PS box, or if I'm working at the desktop, the taskbar gives me all the affordances I need including a 'Type here to search' box.
Key point is that I don't want to press any keys to maintain my awareness of what's running on the machine. Processes with windows associated with them should always be apparent in one way or another. Ubuntu got the less-useful part of the taskbar right -- the quick-launch icons on the column at left -- while failing to do the important thing, which is to show, well, tasks.
I remember when they first started putting Windows keys on keyboards. If you think AI pisses people off, LOL... you weren't reading Slashdot and other Linux-adjacent sites when those keys started showing up. It's amusing to see that they've been embraced (if not extended) by the haters.
> Processes with windows associated with them should always be apparent
KDE and GNOME both solve this with a dock, the same way that Windows and macOS solve it.
> It's amusing to see that they've been embraced (if not extended) by the haters.
The haters by-and-large don't use it. Those haters use esoteric tiling WMs that don't bind anything to super by default.
The KDE and GNOME developers have a direct usability goal. With respect to Slashdot's opinions, the Linux desktop would still be stuck in the 90s if we listened to them. Your perspective as a DOS/PowerShell user is not any more valuable, considering you barely use Windows as-is.
KDE and GNOME both solve this with a dock, the same way that Windows and macOS solve it.
Not by default, GNOME doesn't. Try installing Ubuntu. You get nothing but a blank desktop by default. The bar at left only shows shortcuts for launching tasks, not running tasks themselves.
Your perspective as a DOS/PowerShell user is not any more valuable, considering you barely use Windows as-is.
Those advocating an OS with 5% market share might do well to listen to other perspectives once in a while.
And that this key is called "superkey" is a widespread standard on computers?
Or just linux?
I think the latter. And it might surprise you, but there are computers with no linux installed. I think the vast majority actually. So why the need for insults?
Pretending like the person I'm responding to isn't being willfully ignorant isn't helping. It's pretty simple to guess what "super key" means just from context, if not, it's a very quick (in the op's case) llm query away. Let's be real here.
As someone whose last interaction with Windows was 98 and have been on Mac ever since I also had no idea what a super key was. Also Googled “Windows key” and realized I had seen it before in pictures but never thought about it.
I used some sort of *nix on a VAX terminal in college and ran SUSE on my machine once I realized I hated Windows 98 but all of that is ancient history at this point lol. All of that is to say that it is possible for someone to be peripherally interested in this topic and not be aware of what a super key would be even in context. Maybe someone that uses Windows could pick up on it earlier but I certainly didn’t:)
I am real. I used computers for a long time. Also linux, but not exclusivly.
Guess what, I also only learned recently (some years now I think) after making it mire default, that on linux the windows key is called super key. And the person you insulted clarified he did not use linux at all.
So, how should he have known, despite working with computer extensivly?
> 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.
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.
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.
Global shortcuts definitely a pain point with Wayland but the portals are making progress.