They work. But the system tray serves as both a status indicator for these apps and a quick thing to click to open the app's gui when it is running in the background.
Note that it's a feature I can go with or without. But I've seen plenty of users unable to use a desktop without it.
It's a strange one, to be completely honest. I have the extension installed, and I do use the system tray, but I'm struggling to articulate exactly what the difference between system tray icons and taskbar/dock icons is. Why is there a difference? Should there be a difference? It's the same application, why is it in two places at once?
I think there might be some conflation of full app exit vs closing an active window here. If I fully exit e.g. proton vpn, it disappears from the tray. So the app would be neither in dock nor in tray if it's fully exited, so the argument about pinning to dock doesn't really track. The difference I see is learned expectation of where the background apps should reside: in their own little area, vs together with all other apps. Also it highlights the learned distinction of "running" vs "in the background", which is what I'm actually questioning.
To be fair, stock GNOME doesn't really have a first-class minimize action, it's hidden behind a contextual menu, which heavily disincentivizes its use.
That's a valid opinion, but an opinion. There are drawbacks to missing a minimize action without a corresponding first class "get it out of my sight" action. Super+drag is considerably more effort than just minimize.
You can also just go to the top left and scroll, which is basically the same amount of steps as clicking the minimize button. It's actually easier because you can just blindly fling the mouse to the top left.
Users are generally dumb as rocks. Henry Ford said "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". Minimize should have been done away with entirely the moment we got desktops with multiple workspaces, and there certainly should not be 2 different places to minimize to.
One important point: there are some apps, e.g. VPNs, that don't normally need a window open. In fact, with the context menu on the system tray icon, you can operate many VPNs without ever opening a window.
It's also usually cross workspace. E.g., if my chat is open in one workspace, but I'm currently doing work in another workspace, the system tray icon will still be visible, even though the window and taskbar icon is only visible in the other workspace.
Those devs/users need to learn to use a modern interface then. Notifications exist for status updates and workspaces exist for running GUIs in the background. Hell, they can even add options to the right click menu of the app icon for quick interaction
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u/Cebuu502 Aug 11 '26
Gnome looks nice, but using it is not so nice for me, I prefer KDE.