• azertyfun
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    5 months ago

    The fucking system tray. Which literally every other DE and mainstream OS out there supports because some apps depend on it and break if it doesn’t exist.

    Last I checked GNOME devs said “no, we will never support it, because we’ve DePRecATeD the tray in GTK”.

    It’s functionality so basic I have 3-6 apps which depend on it at any time on my work machine. Anyone saying it doesn’t fall under “basic functionality” is either a GNOME dev or a troll.

    • hibsen@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      5 months ago

      Swear I’m neither of those things, but you’re talking about the system tray as in that little bucket of icons that sits in the lower-right of a taskbar usually?

      This seems like it’d fall pretty neatly in the “you use it, so you think it’s required basic functionally; other people don’t, so they don’t care about it” realm. I do not miss the bucket. It doesn’t seem like awesome functionality (to me) to have to access application features through a bucket of tiny icons instead of the application itself and to be unable to access those features in the application.

      I can see how frustrating it’d be if there’s something you like to use or have to use that only works if it can be in a system tray, but it’s not a ubiquitous feature requirement across all applications, so maybe GNOME is for people that don’t care for apps that require this and all the other mainstream OS options are for folks that do? Man that’s an annoying sentence to read; no wonder people get so angry about what seems like pointless minutiae.

      I assume I dislike it because my work machine (windows, no choice there) always has about 30 things in its pointless icon bucket that can’t be closed by a basic user and do nothing beyond cluttering the taskbar and getting in the way. I get nothing out of a bucket of icons that exist only to silently scream “I’m running in the background still! Just in case anyone cares!” Not having to see that crap on my personal machine is a relief rather than a frustration for me.

      • azertyfun
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        5 months ago

        It’s not as bad nowadays that apps yielded to GNOME’s bullshit. Back when GTK2 apps were still common… Urgh. Plenty of apps were broken without it for no good reason.

        I like opinionated UX - I use sway - but GNOME’s approach is incompatible with “general use” and only works (for now) because of canonical’s weight and ability to impose their vision as the only vision.

        Also they didn’t replace the tray with a better way to manage background apps, so they can suck a dick on the UX front.

        • hibsen@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          5 months ago

          Ah okay I would likely have missed those days since until this year I kept hoping windows wouldn’t completely shit the bed for my gaming PC.

          I’ll have to take a look sway; think I’m still figuring out what I like best and GNOME felt familiar to the MacBook I like using for productivity (although now that I think about it, even Apple has a system-tray-like thing on the top of the screen). KDE was also fine but if I have a choice I usually like picking something with a spotlight-search equivalent; GNOME’s just looks more like spotlight so it activates the dumb part of my brain that likes familiarity.

          Thanks for sticking with me through this conversation. Sometimes it’s hard to convey over text that I’m more ignorant than asshole on most Linux things.

          • azertyfun
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            5 months ago

            I wouldn’t recommend sway to someone who isn’t actively looking for a tiling WM, I would recommend finding a good spotlight equivalent to use on KDE as that will still be less customization work than it would require on barebones sway (which is hardly usable).