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And hopefully never will.

Systray is a wart, abused by too many applications. They should take the android approach, background tasks that cannot have UI and have to communicate with a frontend, which for a change cannot be left hanging in background.

In other words, if you want something in background, make it systemd user service, so the user can use standardized tools to enable/disable/start/stop it. None of that nonsense, where apps keep running after closing all of their windows and resisting to quit (like Skype does).

I cannot imagine my life without systray, sorry.

At the moment I have a metric ton of apps in it (I use pretty much all of them):

* System Volume * CPU/Wi-Fi module temperatures * Clipboard manager * Screenshot manager * Ingress/Egress traffic values (KB per sec) * Current CPU frequency * Battery charge indicator * Network Manager applet which shows Wi-Fi signal strength * Audacious Audio Player * BlueTooth (Blueman) applet * Weather conditions + temperature * Keyboard layout indicator * Time

Remove the system tray from me and my workflow is finished. I will no longer be able to use/manage my devices effectively.

Caring about cpu/wifi temp/frequency/network traffic/battery level seems antiproductive. If the computer is slow 1 time a week, open something to investigate that.

Windows 10 mapped clipboard manager to win-v popup window, works well.

My hardware often works literally for over a decade. If being frugal and taking care of your devices is "antiproductive" for you, I'm a little bit concerned but it's up to you anyways.

Maybe you live in a 1st world country and earn $15K monthly and you can replace your laptop every month. Good. I can afford one every few years at best.

Win+V works here in XFCE as well only it shows over 35 recent entries as opposed to maybe 5 in Windows 10.

All my laptops are at least 3 years old, if not 7. My Nexus 7 is 9 years old, still use it every day.

Taking care of something that doesn't need taking care of seems to be a waste of time though. If the computer gets too hot, it'll slow down until it's not by itself.

Unrelated to system trays:

You might like gkrellm. It handles all those things, but outside the system tray. I used it for decades, and can't find a decent replacement.

I still use gkrellm, but I would much prefer it lived in the system tray, or if tray was gone on the right of the top panel. However, if having a common standard for a system tray is not happening it is even less likely for a common panel interface/API.

As for systemd services. I see tray's role not as a background task runner, but as a way to show tiny GUI elements in unobtrusively.

I used it briefly over two decades ago and I stopped for one single reason: it requires screen estate, it's an actual window. Meanwhile my task bar is visible at all times.
I'm sorry, but no.

My desktop is meant for multitasking, I need a lot of stuff opened to keep track of important information, and the systray allows me to glance over it, and know from which program that important notice came from.

No, I don't want to use a dedicated worspace filled with programs. No, I don't want a notification icon that has to be opened so I keep track of things.

I don't think that's what they're arguing for.

A system using systemd for managing which apps can run in the background can be managed by a task/tray-bar or whatever it's called, just as you expect it to. However, their lifecycle would be decided by yourself/the taskbar manager, rather than each application individually.

So in theory, you could expect all applications to work the same, and any application could be minimized to the taskbar or be run at startup, without the program having to offer that functionality in itself.

that makes a ton more sense, thanks for the clarification
> In other words, if you want something in background, make it systemd user service, so the user can use standardized tools to enable/disable/start/stop it.

That would be sufficient if the "standardized tools" provided a similar UI and user feedback for those background tasks. Sure right now I can already have my file synchronization tool run in the background with a systemd service and manually use `journalctl` or `GNOME Logs` to monitor its state, but that's a far inferior user experience than simply having an icon in the corner of my screen which immediately tells me the state of the file synchronization and also allows me to quickly alter its settings.

So as long as those standard background tasks are so tedious to monitor and interact with, I'll keep using the "nonsense" status tray icons.

Chicken and egg problem.

Most of these services do not want to be managed generically, they want to force themselves on the user. Some sync services need to keep their brand on the screen, after all. Specifically syncing services do not need to hang in notification area, when it is needed to monitor or reconfigure them, it is trivial to launch the controlling app (see syncthing).

Apps like vlc or remmina should bother with systray support at all (they both do, and have it enabled by default).

> Specifically syncing services do not need to hang in notification area, when it is needed to monitor or reconfigure them, it is trivial to launch the controlling app (see syncthing).

I want them there, so that's more than enough reason why they need to be there on my systems. No one forces you to have them on your system.

And this has nothing to do with branding nor is it useless noise, because the icon provides valuable information to me. I don't want to have to use `http://localhost:8384/` or `journalctl` every time I want to know:

* Are there some issues which prevent syncing?

* Is a sync in progress (which means I might not want to suspend/poweroff my machine just now)?

* Is syncing paused or idle?

By your logic we should also get rid of status elements like the clock, network, volume, ... because all those information can be monitored and configured with in their respective applications and system settings.