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Comment by butz | Hacker News Reader

Some interesting news from Dropbox app this morning: "Your desktop environment doesn't support the Dropbox tray icon. Starting May 27, 2025, Dropbox updates will require App Indicator support. To continue using the tray, update your environment."

Only Unity and KDE Plasma desktop environments are supported, others, e.g. GNOME, XFCE, MATE will require installing an extension or plugin.

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I'm never going to understand why desktop environments don't support app indicators. In particular GNOME, which is meant to be accessible to a broader audience.

This was the reason I switched to KDE Plasma, which is excellent these days.

In what way is Gnome meant to be accessible to a broader audience? They clearly do not give that impression; a broader audience would be interested in tray icons, desktop icons, theming support — ideas they clearly reject.

I mean, with such a bad-faith read of what I said; you'd have to be right.

We are in agreement. No need to twist words about to make it seem like we aren't.

If I look at my Windows system tray, it's full of random crap that I never look at and never need to. Windows has to have functionality to automatically hide icons you don't interact with. I can see why Gnome has decided just to do away with the concept.

Interesting. So if I wanted to use dropbox without a desktop environment, I'd need to fake a tray, so it can pretend to put an icon in there?

(I normally use XMonad, and it's very far from a complete desktop environment. It's only a fairly minimal window manager.)

There seems to be a headless mode with lower requirements (scroll to the bottom and expand the Q about headless). This is for the ”full desktop experience”.

Oh, that makes sense. Thanks!

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