Re: I believe we should reconsider our sys-tray removal

[Florian Müllner <fmuellner gnome org>]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 11:42 AM Britt Yazel via desktop-devel-list
<desktop-devel-list gnome org> wrote:
>  I don't like not knowing if Telegram/Discord/Steam are still running after I close them. [...] I'm not 
> sure why exactly these apps don't show a running indicator in the Dash for this use case.

As far as the shell is concerned, an application is running if at
least one window is associated with the app.

That definition isn't easy to change, because there's a fair amount of
technical limitations in place: We have reasonably reliable heuristics
for finding the .desktop file that "belongs" to some window, there's
no such thing for random processes.

There is hope for "non-random" processes though. Flatpak does know
about its running processes and to which app they map, and could
expose that information to the compositor. Maybe a systemd user
instance could provide something like that as well.

It is certainly a question the design team is pondering:

https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Whiteboards/BackgroundApps


Florian