The Adwaita Icon Theme no longer follows the FDO icon naming spec breaking KDE applications on Fedora 40 Workstation and Co. See the concrete state of the issue in the linked article.
The Adwaita Icon Theme no longer follows the FDO icon naming spec breaking KDE applications on Fedora 40 Workstation and Co. See the concrete state of the issue in the linked article.
I also really like GNOME the software but I moved away a few months ago because of this.
As is, the current GNOME is unusable to me without extensions because they refuse to implement support for appindicators. You literally cannot use applications that minimize to tray on vanilla GNOME right now. They have been talking about adding their own protocol for years but that is of no use when things are broken right now.
Important features and bug fixes are always stuck in merge request limbo for years. VRR for Wayland got merged recently after 4 years and it’s still experimental. DRM leasing is still missing on Wayland, KDE added it 3 years ago.
The final straw was when KDE announced HDR support last year I switched over because I knew GNOME would probably lag behind by months or even years.
So what, just use the extension. Currently no cross-desktop API for systrays that doesn’t suck in one or another way exists, so GNOME doesn’t have support for them. If you care that much about not using an extension, implement it for yourself.
You can check this post post about why gnome has done away with appindicators. Basically everyone has their own and it’s a mess, they’re very much not bringing them back, appindicators are being replaced altogether by the notification system.
I’m aware of their reason for dropping support but it’s not sensible to drop a functioning system and replace it with nothing and then talk about how to do it better for years. That post is from 2017, it’s 2024 now and there is still no replacement in sight.
You’ve missed the part where they have no intention of replacing it. It’s bloat. And I agree with them.
Where relevant they’ve added stuff as a core part of the panel, like recently an indicator for VPN connections. If you want to use an application you can alt-tab to it, like we’ve done for decades. Everything else is relegated to media controls and notifications. Appindicators are legacy at this point, and they systematically get cut from modern designs like mobiles.
I agree app indicators are a very strange concept, but the alternative is an app using an extension to place itself in the quicksettings or similar.
Like: Syncthing, Nextcloud, VPN apps. How would they display their small info and sync status?
Notifications, you can have the app fire a notification when it’s synced or disconnects for example. Gnome is working on better notifications right now. Tablets, chromebooks, cell phones… have been doing fine without appindicators; people just have a hard time changing their habits.
Notifications are annoying and should only be used for really important things.
Notifications are more effective at displaying a change of status than a tiny icon turning red. What’s important to someone is gonna vary on a case by case basis, sometimes getting an email is an urgent notification, you can easily turn off the ones you don’t care for or go into DND mode.
At least for us, notifications aren’t something you can really glance at similarly to app indicators. They’re usually text heavy, only really work for longer tasks for readability (which syncing usually isn’t), and are always obscured behind another popup for persistent notifications. Persistent notifications also take up more space within the notifications popup, rather than a small icon that you can easily glance at to know what’s happening.
As for programs not staying in the task manager, they usually take up less space if open as an app indicator, being able to be passively open but not take up as much space.