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I think I should maybe clarify a few things here as I feel that my
original post has left behind the idea in some that we sought a
solution in search for a problem.<br>
So what is the problem we are trying to solve? The problem is that
currently the system tray icons behave unpredictable to the user or
formulated differently: The user can not predict the status of an
application based on where its icon shows up in the system tray, so
the burden of differentiating and rating if an application provides
important information lays on the user instead of the
application/application developer. This problem exists to some
extent in the panel part of the system tray, but it is most apparent
in the popup.<br>
<br>
In the popup we have plasmoids which hold no information for the
user except when they do, like the battery plasmoid when the battery
is fully charged but is still used to adjust the monitor brightness.
The same thing can be said about status notifiers. So the popup
loses its function as an area for information that is still somewhat
relevant to the user, but not relevant enough to warrant constant
display, because the actual important parts are buried beneath a
flood of icons/notifiers with no relevant information at all.<br>
The idea of this area is sound, but it does not work with the tool
at hand. <br>
<br>
The very best solution would be to add a 4th state to SNI, a
"needsHiding" state, if you will. However, we share this
specification with another DE, Unity. So there are several
possibilities how things could play out:<br>
<ol>
<li>Canonical accepts the changes and changes their system tray to
accommodate the new behaviour. All applications using status
notifiers would have to be adapted. This would also solve the
issue that some KDE applications' notifier is broken in Unity
e.g. KTorrent. I'm not sure how realistic this option is, given
that they seem very happy with how their implementation works.<br>
</li>
<li>We adopt Unity's policy in handling the "passive" status. Only
some applications like KTorrent would have to be adapted, but
would now be working in both Plasma and Unity again.</li>
<li>We add a 4th status to SNI without Canonical's agreement. We'd
end up with xembed, GNOME Shell's thing, appindicators, and our
new SNI – 4 with each other incompatible solutions. The only
place where we can realistically pull this off is system tray
plasmoids, as they would not work in Unity anyway to my
information.</li>
<li>Do nothing, the system tray popup remains as cluttered and
space wasting as always.<br>
</li>
</ol>
<br>
Another thing to clarify: The proposal of the changes on plasmoids
and status notifiers are _not_ independent of each other. If the
changes to plasmoids are accepted, then we would have improved the
their usefulness, but the overall problem would still be there. We
need to have a way to separate the useful "passive" icons from the
useless in order to improve the situation.<br>
We think that the most realistic option is 2., but the best solution
would of course be 1. I have tried to reach out to Canonical, but I
had not much luck, probably because I do not know the right people.<br>
What's important to note is that we really did not came up with this
out of the blue, and we did assess the situation, what applications
are doing and why. We really just want to improve the situation and
think that 2. is the most realistic option while encompassing
relatively little work.<br>
<br>
We don't like to break work flows either. If we can pull of 1. that
would be rad, but I really doubt it's going to happen any time soon.<br>
<br>
Cheers<br>
Phil<br>
<br>
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