Dear community, dear Gnome developers,
I would like to discuss the possibilities to bring back Gnome's legacy tray for a limited time in order to improve the desktop experience.
I have read the blog [1], and I guess I disagree with the way the icon tray is seen and treated. In in my personal opinion, from an end-user perspective, the following assumption is wrong: Icons in the tray and notifications provide different features. They should not be merged (at least not until functionality is given). The tray contains icons that are used to control apps that are running in the background, while notifications are being used to output messages background apps may have. The list of apps that currently rely on the icon tray to function properly is long and likely well known among community members, (examples under [1] and [2]).
I kindly would like to ask the developers to reconsider the usage of the legacy tray until a decent amount of apps have adopted the new concept. One may not like the tray, but it has a tiny footprint and it is almost invisible when hidden. In my opinion it also let's the desktop appear much clean than the available extensions that permanently display icons of all background apps (that use such icons).
[1] https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2017/08/31/status-icons-and-gnome/
[2] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/phocean/TopIcons-plus/master/screenshots/before.png