Re: GNOME Shell 3.25.90

[Florian Müllner <fmuellner gnome org>]

On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 9:32 AM Jan Niklas Hasse <jhasse bixense com> wrote:

On Fri, 11 Aug 2017, at 02:58, Florian Müllner wrote:
>  * Remove legacy status icon tray [Florian; #785956]

To make this less painfull for users, what do you think about adding native support for a DBus based approach like https://github.com/rgcjonas/gnome-shell-extension-appindicator ?

(Disclaimer: There will be a blog post from the design team to outline the details behind the change. Unfortunately the release was already overdue, so we had to push the change in time for the freeze before getting the communication out)

To answer your question:

No. When we were referring to status icons as 'legacy', we didn't mean the underlying XEmbed technology, but the UI concept of allowing apps to put their small icon into the system area. Trying to convince developers to stop using status icons (at least when running in GNOME) has been going on for years[0], but without too much success - after all, why change something that still works (somehow). 

While StatusNotifiers are nicer than XEmbed ui-wise (when used with canonical's dbus-menu extension, and ignoring all kinds of ugly in the spec/implementation), supporting them wouldn't help the goal of moving away from status icons.

In the huge majority of cases, applications work perfectly fine without status icons, and more often than not the primary purpose of the icon is brand recognition. For users who don't mind that and like the "quick access" feature, there are extensions available to add that support, but in our opinion, not having that functionality at all makes for a better out-of-the-box experience (there's even an extension for this, so at least *some* of our users agree  ;-) ).

For the few cases that do indeed depend on status icons - namely where there's no other UI, as for nextcloud, dropbox and the likes - there is ongoing work on a cloud provider API in the filemanager[1]. It is expected to make its appearance in the upcoming 3.26 release, and will be supported by the NextCloud client. We do hope that other cloud providers like Dropbox will follow suit.

[0] https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Whiteboards/StatusIcons 

[2] https://blog.juliushaertl.de/index.php/2017/07/12/an-update-on-cloud-providers-integration/