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Comment by bardak | Hacker News Reader

My favorite GNOME developer's hill to die on is their refusal to implement a system tray or work with the rest of the Linux desktop community to create an alternative to the system tray. Don't get me wrong there has been a abuse of the system tray but the refusal to acknowledge that there is a use case for persistent notifications or status indicators is ridiculous. there suggestion is that notifications are the solution is so inadequate. It's pretty telling that their arguments aren't sound when they have chosen to implement traditional system tray items such as a battery indicator and volume indicator as built in items on the task bar but they dismiss the idea that a chat app status indicator would be useful.

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Mark Shuttleworth (of Ubuntu fame) had quite a bit to say about trying to get AppIndicators into GNOME.

https://archive.is/M1MW2

I guess, those of us who actually like the idea should be more vocal. As otherwise the devs would read the comments and decide nobody likes what they do. Personally, I’m super happy about current Gnome. Coming after 10+ years of macOS. I don’t want to see that ugly mess of visual distractions on my screen all the time. Basic vitals like battery is okay for me. Distractions from apps, I don’t need them. They serve zero purpose to me, and being a computer user of 20+ years, I never interacted with those widgets. Even on Windows. So, kudos to Gnome team, I really like Gnome since 42 or when they started this radical simplicity thing. I enjoy the system each and every day I interact with it, and it does not wear off. It’s not like it looks cool, but after a couple of days I understand it isn’t.

Thing is: That's your preference and nobody should force you to use these indicators. Even on Windows, the tray icons are usually mostly hidden away.

I find them highly useful on macOS, but there I lack the configurability I have on Windows.

Having to interact with them, even having to hide them, is forcing them upon me. I don’t understand a reason for them to exist. They’re simply useless to me and a sign of a complex design.

GNOME is open to adding a system tray. There are even designs for it.

There is just no one working on the technology. TingPing, an Igalia employee and GNOME contributor, was working on a new D-Bus protocol for it, but the work stopped. There is a PR up on the freedesktop xdg-specs repository.

I am personally so glad Gnome does not have a system tray, on every other DE its a disgusting mess of differently scaled and styled icons.

That sounds like an issue that could be solved by forcing icons and sizes for the tray.

Just give users the ability to pin the icons they care about and hide the others in a pop-out panel like Windows does.

That too, very basic feature that should be in every DE.

So rather than disable the system tray, or use other applications that don't have inconsistent scaled and styled icons, you'd prefer that nobody who uses Gnome is able to have a system tray?

I prefer not having to worry about it at all, and I don't. Its tidy by default and stays tidy no matter what I install. Many other "deficiencies" in Gnome, like the lack of desktop filing, or the austere file manager contribute to this tidiness.

The first versions of Gnome 3 did indeed have a system tray for backwards compatibility, and it was hidden out of the way until you needed it. Eventually it was scrapped once enough software was updated to not rely on it.

If somebody insists on having a messy UI, they can use literally any other DE available for Linux.

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