GNOME Is Making It Easier To Track Running Background Apps

A pending change to the GNOME Shell will make it easier to monitor running background applications that otherwise are not visually presented currently on the desktop.

A few months back developer Georges Basile Stavracas Neto added background apps monitoring to Flatpak's xdg-desktop-portal to expose background running applications via D-Bus so that desktops can develop richer interfaces around the background-running apps. This was motivated by some GNOME design mock-ups for being able to visually represent running applications that otherwise aren't represented by a GUI.

Georges Basile Stavracas Neto followed through a few days ago with a GNOME Shell merge request to show the running background applications from within the shell's quick settings menu. Any background apps/services as registered with xdg-desktop-portal will be displayed in the GNOME quick settings menu for easy management like VPN services.

As of writing the merge request hasn't yet landed but it looks like it could be on a path to soon given it's quickly being iterated and addressing feedback from other developers.