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Comment by aboardRat4 | Hacker News Reader

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System tray has been with us since Windows 95

The Gnome desktop considers systray icons useless and by default does not ship or support any systray. If I understand the article correctly, the Dropbox client can no longer run on defsult Gnome desktops.

I run gnome on all my machines with displays, for many years now. I never paid much thought to what "AppIndicator" is, but I've always used what I believe you're calling "systray", if I understand correctly?

I have temperature and network gauges on the top right next to my battery/audio/WiFi indicators. My work laptop (Ubuntu) has indicators up there for Livepatch and Mattermost, or are these not the same thing?

As far as I recall, I've not had to do anything particularly special other than install the extension for the thing I want, Freon etc, and the Livepatch and Mattermost ones were just there whether I wanted them or not.

It's possible I did something when I setup Gnome on my personal laptop (Arch) but other machines are running Ubuntu and I think it just did this OOB.

This is because Ubuntu ships with extensions to restore AppIndicator (systray) functionality on Gnome.

That makes sense, thanks for the info!

To be fair, Gnome has made some questionable UX decisions - including this one.

Interesting UX decisions and Gnome have gone hand in hand since I first came across it.

The earliest one I remember was when they discovered spatial memory and promptly decided that, by default, every Nautilus folder should open in a new top-level window, cluttering up my desktop before I could even start working.

ELI5: There were two standards how to implement a system tray: an old one and a new one. Dropbox is dropping support for the old standard.

One has to be deliberately obtuse to pretend to not see how ridiculous it is to make having a third-party application that shows little icons in the corner of the screen a hard requirement for a cloud file sync application.

I use Linux and don't have a taskbar, a topbar, a sysbar, nor anything similar. I've never seen the need for one when I can manage my windows in other ways and have more screen real estate available. What does that have to do with syncing my files?

It's a requirement for the GUI. The CLI still works without any requirements. If I understood things correctly. I don't have a linux machine on hand and don't use dropbox anyways.

Perhaps people like you (and I) are not the target audience. I've always felt Dropbox was more of an "typical user" (as opposed to power user) file sync; I used it some years ago but never really liked it, I roll my own now.

I wonder whether Dropbox looked at some stats and realised that many of their users are on beginner-friendly distros/desktops and that such a requirement would help (them) more than it would hurt (users).

As have other desktop OSes since forever.

The uproar for little details like this, is why Linux Desktop is never going to make it on mainstream.

On the other hand, the very reason I use Linux is that I get more freedom, including the freedom to choose my window manager.

I don't care so much about Linux Desktop becoming mainstream. Probably it would make it look more like those OSes I like less. I don't really get those comments I regularly see where people go "if you don't make it look like Windows, people won't migrate to your distro". If I wanted Windows, I would use Windows. And I don't want people who want Windows to come to my distro.

Meanwhile Valve failed to convince games industry to care about GNU/Linux as platform, and has to make use of Proton to make SteamOS relevant, even though PlayStation and Android are very much Linux like on their technology stack.

I think that Proton works pretty well. I am very impressed by Valve's effort there and the amount of games that are now available on Linux.

But I don't think it's related to the Desktop environment, is it? Somehow I feel like many people who complain about Linux not being "mainstream material" want Windows, but free and without ads/trackers.

I don't want Windows, I want freedom. Freedom to choose my init system, my window manager, my filesystem, my terminal, hell even my libc.

The thing is, I don't think it can happen with a mainstream system. The industry won't care about supporting Linux unless there is critical mass, and in order to have critical mass you have to onboard all those people who want Windows (but free), not Linux. Already now, too many projects only work with the latest Ubuntu and assume systemd and some specific dependencies.

If Ubuntu were to become mainstream, instead of having Windows, macOS and Linux I fear we would have Windows, macOS, Ubuntu and Linux. Not sure it would change anything for me.

Actually only since (i think) windows 11: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030910-00/?p=42...

"I think the reason people started calling it the “system tray” is that on Win95 there was a program called “systray.exe” that displayed some icons in the notification area: volume control, PCMCIA (as it was then called) status, battery meter. If you killed systray.exe, you lost those notification icons. So people thought, “Ah, systray must be the component that manages those icons, and I bet its name is ‘system tray’.” Thus began the misconception that we have been trying to eradicate for over eight years…"

Doesn't change the feature was already there, with Win32 APIs to interact with it.

Yeah, but until Windows 11 it was the notification area! But for Windows 11 it looks like they gave up on this fight, finally, and the general UI in Windows 11 actually now calls it the system tray. So presumably that is now its official name.

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