GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 750022
System tray is broken
Last modified: 2017-08-15 23:47:39 UTC
It jumps around like crazy when hovered. It actually also jumps like 1px vertically which is just totally broken since it's not even supposed to be vertical. Personally - I hate it. It introduces the same issues we had in Fedora 15 which we solved by hiding the message tray using pointer barriers which got working really good in Fedora 20 / Fedora 21. Now we have the same issues where this always-visible-floater is occluding your app (I'm literally having the message tray in the way of the Build button in QtCreator and that's just one example. Having floaters which popup all the time over your app is bad, we had this in Fedora 15 and we solved it. Just go ahead and nuke that message tray, you have plenty of room in the top bar, just put them there. Or bring back the old message tray for trayed icons because the new floater is the most annoying thing ever. PS - otherwise the new gnome is awesome!
What is the "system tray"? Do you refer to the legacy stuff at the bottom, or the actual notification area in the top bar?
Legacy icon container in bottom left. However - it's not that "legacy" since chrome, skype and steam use it today.
Perhaps the better way to go about it would be to implement the thing that makes the most sense, put it in the Top Bar>System status icons area, only design a new way to do this. To push forward this would need to be designed first, which should not be hard, and than picked up by someone to actually make the thing work and not just be pretty pictures. The logical way to do so would be a Win 7 like tray, _only_ for the legacy icons, in which all icons would be hidden except for one until clicking an arrow, they would all then appear. You move the cursor away and they all hide again except for a) the last one used or b) the first one created. If none are open the "arrow" would hide. I have heard this would not be possible, yet other UIs have done so, and in the one I mentioned they even managed to create an entire popup menu containing the others that weren't visible in the tray itself. But limiting the visible item to 1 in the top bar would seem to ease all tensions a bit, no?
Win 7 way is a good design and I have pretty much voted for this since Fedora 15. But gnome isn't about democracy so we will have to see what the big-shots decide to do about it. Right now it's broken anyways.
Maybe we should start by actually implementing the thing bug free. As I have reported in this thread: currently the legacy-container is extremely buggy. The animation is actually moving the thing up & down 1 pixel - it should only move it left & right. Because of this - if I place my mouse cursor at the bottom left corner, the tray will animate out, move 1 pixel up, now the mouse cursor is not hovering it anymore so it will animate in again, move 1 pixel down, become hovered again, animate out, etc etc. Infinite loop, infinite Parkinson.
(In reply to Alex Hultman from comment #5) > Maybe we should start by actually implementing the thing bug free. As I have > reported in this thread: currently the legacy-container is extremely buggy. > > The animation is actually moving the thing up & down 1 pixel - it should > only move it left & right. Because of this - if I place my mouse cursor at > the bottom left corner, the tray will animate out, move 1 pixel up, now the > mouse cursor is not hovering it anymore so it will animate in again, move 1 > pixel down, become hovered again, animate out, etc etc. Infinite loop, > infinite Parkinson. From what I have figured that issue is purely a css one. Try out my 'Ciliora-Tertia' and Secunda themes to see that they don't have this issue.
Created attachment 321737 [details] [review] Fix for GNOME Shell's 3.18 theme After looking into this theme, it seems the border property in .legacy-tray is causing the undesired behaviour. An alternative is to apply the border to the tray's StBoxLayout, preserving the appearance and solving this issue.
Comment on attachment 321737 [details] [review] Fix for GNOME Shell's 3.18 theme Thanks for tracking down the vertical jiggling - I've pushed a slightly different fix in bug 747957. Still for future reference, a couple of notes on the patch: - the css is generated from sass, so style patches should be made against data/theme/gnome-shell-sass/_common.scss rather than the generated files - patches should be against master (and possibly backported to stable branches afterwards) - please use git-format-patch over plain diff for proper attribution
Closing this ticket as WONTFIX as the legacy tray (introduced three years ago in 3.16) was meant as a temporary solution to encourage maintainers to move away from the concept of status icons and will not be included anymore in 3.26. Users can install one of the existing extensions, either based on the still available XEmbed support or implementing the DBus-based StatusNotifier spec.