GNOME Now Has an Official Extension for Legacy Tray Icons (www.omgubuntu.co.uk)

submitted 3 months ago by petsoi@discuss.tchncs.de to c/gnome@discuss.tchncs.de

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[-] aleph@lemm.ee 4 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I'm confused

Will GNOME’s new Status Icons ad-on support all of the same tray icon that Ubuntu’s kStatus/AppIndicator extension does?

I haven’t been able to test it to find out for sure, but it doesn’t appear to support App Indicators, which is the most commonly-used tray icon spec on Linux…

So ... If this new extension doesn't add tray icons/menus for apps like Zoom, what's the point of it? What features does it add over stock Gnome?

[-] al4s@feddit.org 7 points 3 months ago

Stock GNOME doesn't have tray icons. If your distribution does show them, they probably preinstalled an extension for you (like Ubuntu does).

[-] aleph@lemm.ee 6 points 3 months ago

Thanks, I'm aware, but that wasn't my question.

This new extension doesn't seem to add support for app indicators.. so what is it for?

[-] ardorhb@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Actual legacy tray icons.

AppIndicator more or less allows an application to send an icon and a list of menu items to the desktop environment to be displayed there in some way. Classic tray icons, on the other hand, are actually part of the application that provides them, the system just puts them in a common row for all applications.

While this type of tray icon is more flexible because applications can do anything they want there, AppIndicators are a better/safer solution because ... well, applications just cannot mess around in the system tray as much.

Personally, I thought the classic tray icons were as good as dead (on Linux), but I guess GNOME can always surprise. Not only in removing stuff but also in bringing it back.

[-] aleph@lemm.ee 4 points 3 months ago

Ah, that was the explanation that I was looking for. Much obliged.

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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2024

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