The Adwaita Icon Theme no longer follows the FDO icon naming spec breaking KDE applications on Fedora 40 Workstation and Co. See the concrete state of the issue in the linked article.
The Adwaita Icon Theme no longer follows the FDO icon naming spec breaking KDE applications on Fedora 40 Workstation and Co. See the concrete state of the issue in the linked article.
You can check this post post about why gnome has done away with appindicators. Basically everyone has their own and it’s a mess, they’re very much not bringing them back, appindicators are being replaced altogether by the notification system.
I’m aware of their reason for dropping support but it’s not sensible to drop a functioning system and replace it with nothing and then talk about how to do it better for years. That post is from 2017, it’s 2024 now and there is still no replacement in sight.
You’ve missed the part where they have no intention of replacing it. It’s bloat. And I agree with them.
Where relevant they’ve added stuff as a core part of the panel, like recently an indicator for VPN connections. If you want to use an application you can alt-tab to it, like we’ve done for decades. Everything else is relegated to media controls and notifications. Appindicators are legacy at this point, and they systematically get cut from modern designs like mobiles.
I agree app indicators are a very strange concept, but the alternative is an app using an extension to place itself in the quicksettings or similar.
Like: Syncthing, Nextcloud, VPN apps. How would they display their small info and sync status?
Notifications, you can have the app fire a notification when it’s synced or disconnects for example. Gnome is working on better notifications right now. Tablets, chromebooks, cell phones… have been doing fine without appindicators; people just have a hard time changing their habits.
Notifications are annoying and should only be used for really important things.
Notifications are more effective at displaying a change of status than a tiny icon turning red. What’s important to someone is gonna vary on a case by case basis, sometimes getting an email is an urgent notification, you can easily turn off the ones you don’t care for or go into DND mode.
At least for us, notifications aren’t something you can really glance at similarly to app indicators. They’re usually text heavy, only really work for longer tasks for readability (which syncing usually isn’t), and are always obscured behind another popup for persistent notifications. Persistent notifications also take up more space within the notifications popup, rather than a small icon that you can easily glance at to know what’s happening.
As for programs not staying in the task manager, they usually take up less space if open as an app indicator, being able to be passively open but not take up as much space.
The problem is when you allow one developer its own applet, every application wants one, and suddenly you have 15 applets. Applications need to figure out alternative design patterns to achieve the same result or sidestep the problem.
There’s this saying, out of sight, out of mind, do you really need to have a constant eye on every application? When there’s an actual change you get a notification.
@imecth @cullmann @ohyran @UnityDevice @domi Ah, but this is not true. It wasn’t even true when Allan wrote that blog post, and it’s still not true now. As it is, Fedora Workstation has an open ticket about adding the appindicator extension because applications are broken without it and Ubuntu maintains and ships it to support a useful user experience.
Currently the ticket is deferred until we resolve updating the SNI spec.
@imecth @cullmann @ohyran @UnityDevice @domi It wasn’t true when Allan wrote that blog post, and it’s still not true now. If you drop XEmbed and only support SNI (as Plasma did years ago), you have one way to handle it. As it is, Fedora Workstation has an open ticket about adding the appindicator extension because applications are broken without it and Ubuntu maintains and ships it to support a useful user experience.
Currently the ticket is deferred until we resolve updating the SNI spec.