I believe we should reconsider our sys-tray removal

[Britt Yazel <bwyazel gnome org>]

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Congrats on an excellent 3.32 release! As the one handling the front facing side of our social media accounts, I can safely say that the users are EXTREMELY happy with the changes, both features and performance, so give yourselves a nice pat on the back :-)

I want to re-poen an old argument now that we have seen the effects of removing the sys-tray/app-indicator tray for well over a year. In short, the users are not happy. I believe our goals of putting pressure on application developers to ditch the antiquated app-indicator model fell mostly on deaf ears, and not having the sys-tray icons is mostly a nuisance for people, and big pain point for many.

Our users (myself included) and our software partners (Ubuntu, System76, Purism) have reverted to using extensions to return this behavior. Some use KStatusNotifier, some use TopIcons/Plus/Redux, and the point I'm making is that we have forced our users to fragment themselves between many solutions, some decent and some fully broken, for what they perceive as base level functionality. An example of this biting us in the arse is that with 3.32 TopIcons is causing the CPU usage to run through the roof, and people are blaming the Shell for the CPU usage, not the extension, leaving our users with a bad taste in their mouths.

So to sum up, most users who I talk to on social media and in person are using many different 3rd party solutions for sys-tray icons, and this fragmented approach is hurting our image, annoying our users, and is fragmenting our user experience to the point of actual detriment. I think we need to re-evaluate a solution for 3.34, and that this should be a focus this cycle. I believe that there is an elegant solution to handling sys-tray icons without sacrificing our core goals, one idea being to incorporate it into the Dash. However, I don't think we should go forward into 3.34+ without a 1st party solutions in place for how to treat sys-tray icons, because (sadly) they're not going anywhere.

Cheers!

-Britt Yazel