10
votes
Do you just leave apps open in Gnome?
I use keepassxc as my password manager and it sits in the system tray quietly until it is requisited by a login form in firefox.
Gnome does not have a system tray, so you just open keepassxc on startup and it just stays there floating in the background?
It's been months since I last used Gnome. Did anything change or it's still like this?
While Gnome doesn't officially support a system tray, they live on in the form of an extension. I actually just switched away from Gnome yesterday but I would keep Steam, Discord, and Bitwarden running in the background and have the system tray indicator in my top bar. It does require some fiddling but what in Linux doesn't?
Thanks.
Yeah I know about the extension, I was just curious what people who don't use them did. Seems weird to me installing an extension for something that everyone uses.
I'll keep using river until Cosmic reaches beta, but I've been considering trying Gnome these days.
As a KDE dev, I am obligated to ask:
What about KDE Plasma? :)
(I like to hear the negative too, so I can see if there's something I can help improve)
Oh I love Plasma. That's what I use when not using a tiling WM.
I just think it is too much for what I need. And theming is a little convoluted. You have to change global theme, sddm theme and on konsole there's a whole dance with creating another profile and than changing the theme there too. Than you have to change the GTK theme to match.
Cosmic seems to go right about this. Change the theme and it applies to GTK themes too.
Yeah im not fan of our current theming situation too. Its.. Complicated to fix.
Short answer:
yes
Long answer:
I'm not a fan of Gnome's default settings, so I use the Dash to Panel extension, which among other things adds a system tray.
Tangent/rant/speculation:
It's clear that the Gnome project has a vision for what a computer desktop should look and behave like. Full focus on the current task seems to be part of it, so they hid away the dash and the system tray. It's a bold move; the kind of thing Apple sometimes does, but Microsoft never dares. They must have known it would piss off a significant amount of users, but they did it anyway, because they had a vision of a better workflow.
I tried for a while to adjust my workflow to the Gnome template, but after some frustration, I ended up instead adjusting Gnome to my workflow.
Interestingly, Windows also made changes to their system tray a while back. They haven't gone as far as removing it, but they made just a very few icons visible by default, and hid the rest behind a button. It seems like the system tray doesn't really fit in their vision either, but because so many users and applications depend on their system tray icons, they haven't been as bold as Gnome.
My use of Gnome seems to fit very well with what the developers have in mind, because so far I have never missed the system tray during these months I've been running Gnome. In fact, while trying KDE again for a day, I found the system tray annoying and ugly even (but would probably get used to it quickly enough).
I guess I do keep the windows open as you say, but it hasn't been an issue for me (I like to keep them in separate 'desktops' anyway so that they're always where I want them to be)
Most of the apps I just close, since there's no reason to have them constantly open. The apps that need to stay in the background (eg. for notifications) can just do so, they're listed in the "background apps" section in GNOME's built in quick menu and can be closed from there, no need for a system tray
The "background apps" looks more like a tray with extra steps and less functionality.
You need 3 clicks to go there and it doesn't even have context menus.
Yeah, it only exists for the purpose of listing background apps, it's the same thing as the "Background apps" menu on Android. Full tray support may be added once Freedesktop agrees on a proper tray item specification that isn't a broken mess. [1]
I honestly don't really get the purpose of a tray though. Obviously my experience differs from everyone else's so I accept that someone may need the tray, but I don't think I used it even once for anything except for killing background apps even when I used systems with a built-in tray.
It was slightly controversial when identified but GNOME doesn't close apps in a conventional way anyway, operating a bit closer to Android. If you X out a window the app still runs in the background unless kt exits on its own or you force kill it, iirc.
That's also how MacOS apps work traditionally, although more applications are closing on exit of the window to match windows applications.
I do, it is annoying how you can’t close Discord/Armcord and some other apps because of that though.
I prefer Gnome’s defaults over KDE(will probably move over to Cosmic when it becomes available though) but small things like that are annoying.
The not-SpotLight extension already is kinda unstable(Or gnome as a whole can be unstable time from time on NixOS) so I don’t like to deal with extensions.