Re: GNOME Shell 3.25.90

[Jan Niklas Hasse <jhasse bixense com>]

On Fri, 11 Aug 2017, at 18:33, Florian Müllner wrote:
> 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)

So change it before communicating it? Why not do the blog post before the final decision? (I think the reason 
is because you know what the reaction is going to be)

> 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). 

This is a very controversial topic, but have you considered, that *maybe* the reason for the missing success 
is that you're wrong?

> In the huge majority of cases, applications work perfectly fine without status icons,

So your opinion is fact?

I think a lot of applications work worse without status icons. For example chat applications or screen 
recorders. I don't want to install an extension for those!

> and more often than not the primary purpose of the icon is brand recognition.

So? That's also the purpose of most app icons!

> 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.

That's not a replacement and missing many features tray icons provide right now.