The Biggest GNOME Stories Of 2018

[rastersoft]

I'm still pissed from their decision last year to remove tray icons in 3.26.

The tray is incompatible with Wayland. But you can always use KStatusNotifier, which works both in X and Wayland.

[finalzone]

I did try to test gnome3 to know how bad it is today and it is so bad.

Running Gnome Shell on Fedora 29 provides a smooth experience on HP Envy x360 Ryzen 2500U.
Very minimal distraction due to paradigm focusing more on keyboard and very usable with touchscreen and stylus (after getting the fix for the kerne) for artists and design alike.
Unhappy with the modern look? Switch to Gnome Classic (I haven't used for a very long time).

[finalzone]

I would also be happy to see it go, if there was some alternative which was less introusive.

But there isn't, which is why I'm annoyed.

Available via extensions.gnome.org

[johanb]

johanb there’s notifications.

Did you even read the rest of my comment?

You cannot use notifications to show if a program is running in the background or not.

There's a reason why Gnome suddenly decided that the shell needed a built-in night light and the two reasons were that they were too lazy to supply an API to do color management and the second reason is because they don't allow tray icons anymore so they couldn't find a simple and easily accesible way to manage the settings, so they hardcoded it in to the shell.

The tray is incompatible with Wayland. But you can always use KStatusNotifier, which works both in X and Wayland.

But they could've made it compatible with Wayland and they haven't made it possible for the extension to support it either. So no Wayland for me sadly.

Available via extensions.gnome.org

Hooray, yet another basic feature which is supplied as an extension which gets support for the newest GNOME versions months too late!

I have one computer with Gnome permanently installed and I currently need 3 extensions to get an acceptable workflow, it's really annoying.

[Brisse]

You cannot use notifications to show if a program is running in the background or not.

This is what 'gnome-system-monitor' and 'ps -e' is for.

[cynical]

I'm still pissed from their decision last year to remove tray icons in 3.26.

They talk about having other APIs which are supposed to replace these which are the notification API, media playback API, search API and cloud providers API but even with those APIs in mind they forget the simple fact that lots of applications do not fit into these categories but still run in the backgound and the user needs some indication if they are running or not.

It may be less justifiable in default Gnome because you cannot tell at a glance (you need to hit the meta key) which apps are running, but if you use a dock the way I do (as an ever present panel on left side of your screen), the dock acts as your system tray. This also makes a lot more sense and presents the user with a more consistent UI, since you have a clear separation between applications (which sit in the dock) and system controls (which sit along the top bar).

"Background apps" doesn't even make sense to me as a concept anymore. They are just annoying little icons that I have to manage in addition to the traditional taskbar. I have to check both places if I want to be certain there is nothing active.

[Britoid]

This is what 'gnome-system-monitor' and 'ps -e' is for.

Yeh with Flatpak apps that isn't the case, they look like a bunch of bwrap processes.

[johanb]

This is what 'gnome-system-monitor' and 'ps -e' is for.

That's not very user friendly.
Some apps also have a different binary name from what the application name which is confusing to many.

It may be less justifiable in default Gnome because you cannot tell at a glance (you need to hit the meta key) which apps are running, but if you use a dock the way I do (as an ever present panel on left side of your screen), the dock acts as your system tray. This also makes a lot more sense and presents the user with a more consistent UI, since you have a clear separation between applications (which sit in the dock) and system controls (which sit along the top bar).

"Background apps" doesn't even make sense to me as a concept anymore. They are just annoying little icons that I have to manage in addition to the traditional taskbar. I have to check both places if I want to be certain there is nothing active.

Agreed that the top icons are annoying, but in that case by taskbar would be filled with 5 apps which I maybe only click on once every day or two which is very annoying since it's now cluttered with stuff I use rarely but still want to run in the background.

johanb
Yes, I read your comments. And I think you are way out of line. compositor leve screen access/manipulation is very different from having applications running in the back ground. I have absolutely no problem with the shell having a few special cases.

For the background applications it is very easy to see which is running. And the can send me notifications using standard APIs.

Where is it easy to see which non-system background applications are running? Don't tell me "System Monitor" because no one wants to dig through 100 processes which names often isn't even the name of the application.

I don't have the ability to easily see if Steam, RescueTime, Skype, Discord or Wire runs in the background anymore and the GNOME devs seem to think that is fine according to this list. Steam and RescueTime are also background applications which do not fit into either chat applications, media players or cloud providers so there are no suitable APIs available to them.