On Thu, Mar 1= 5, 2018 at 12:02 PM, Paul Johansson <paul.johansson@linuxmail.o= rg> wrote:

Dear community, dear Gnome developers,

I would like to discuss the possibilities to bring back Gnome's lega= cy 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 t= ray is seen and treated. In in my personal opinion, from an end-user perspe= ctive, the following assumption is wrong: Icons in the tray and notificatio= ns provide different features. They should not be merged (at least not unti= l functionality is given). The tray contains icons that are used to control= apps that are running in the background, while notifications are being use= d to output messages background apps may have. The list of apps that curren= tly rely on the icon tray to function properly is long and likely well know= n 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. On= e may not like the tray, but it has a tiny footprint and it is almost invis= ible when hidden. In my opinion it also let's the desktop appear much c= lean than the available extensions that permanently display icons of all ba= ckground apps (that use such icons).

What would be options?

Android is a pretty comprehensive example of a UI that uses what t= he GNOME team is describing.

A visible Android app= lication is running.=C2=A0 When the application window disappears it is &qu= ot;paused" but still in memory can can perform most of its normal duti= es.=C2=A0 Finally paused applications may be "stopped" and will n= ot be allowed to run any more and have their resources collected.=C2=A0 If = you want your background application to keep running you pin a notification= to the notification tray (ex a music player, file system uploads, etc).=C2= =A0 Alternatively you can schedule with Android tasks that your application= needs to perform and the OS will launch your application in the background= , allow it to perform those tasks, and then shut it back down (Ex check for= new posts in an rss feed).=C2=A0 You may also configure event listeners th= at will cause your application to launch, perform a task, and shut back dow= n (ex push messages).=C2=A0 In these cases you do not need a pinned notific= ation.

The previous paragraph vastly oversimplifie= s Android applications, but it is at a high level an easy model to referenc= e when thinking about how trayless GNOME applications may work.=C2=A0 I don= 't know if GNOME supports this model in any meaningful way, but it is o= ne approach to aspire toward.

The best thing I can= say about getting rid of the system tray is that it and the alt-tab behavi= or introduced me to the world of extensions.

=C2=A0

Many thanks,

Paul

[1] https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2017/08/31/status-icons-and-gnome= /

[2] https://raw.githubuserconte= nt.com/phocean/TopIcons-plus/master/screenshots/before.png

=C2=A0

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