An update on System Tray, Plasma Next ("KDE 5") and GTK+

[Kevin Kofler]

Hi,

Quoting from Marco Martin's blog post:
http://notmart.org/blog/2014/06/systemtray-plasma-next-and-gtk/
(Annotations from me are enclosed in parentheses.)

> You may have heard that KDE Plasma Next won’t support anymore the old
> X11,Xembed-based systemtray icons.

(KDE Plasma Next is the next major version of the KDE workspace(s), to
replace the current KDE Plasma 4 workspace(s). In particular, the new
version is scheduled to replace KDE Plasma Desktop 4 in Fedora 22.)

> (More information here
> [http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/03/system-tray-in-plasma-next/])

(I already posted a message to this mailing list back then.)

> Years ago, we developed a nicer, model/view based alternative in which is
> the shell that actually draws the systemtray icon, allowing better
> integration with the workspace, it’s a specification that is now shared
> between KDE and Ubuntu Unity.
> All KDE applications use it already, Qt4/Qt5-only application will use it
> depending on a small patch (and soon Qt5 will do out of the box)
>
> But also GTK has some options: until today I was aware only about the
> Ubuntu’s appindicator library [https://launchpad.net/libappindicator], but
> I have just been contacted by the author of another neat library, that can
> be found here on GitHub [https://github.com/jjk-jacky/statusnotifier].
> It’s a very small, few dependencies GObject-based library that allows a
> GTK3 application to export and control a statusnotifier-based systemtray
> icon. I just tested it on KDE4 and Plasma Next and seems to work quite
> well.
> So if you have a GTK application that is using a systemtray icon, and you
> would like the icon to be integrated in the next version of Plasma as
> well, now you have an option more (and of course, the author will be happy
> of any patch/bugreport/bugfix).

(Short version: If you maintain a GTK+ application that uses system tray
icons, please work with upstream on getting it ported to either
https://launchpad.net/libappindicator or
https://github.com/jjk-jacky/statusnotifier by Fedora 22 at the latest, or
enable existing upstream support ASAP.)

        Kevin Kofler