REGRESSION: No system tray icon in KDE Plasma 5

[Chris Taylor]

I've just upgraded from Kubuntu 14.10 with Plasma 4 to Kubuntu 15.04 with Plasma 5. Now, a number of system tray icons no longer appear, including Tasque.

See http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/06/where-are-my-systray-icons/ for more info.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Philip Collins (pa-collins)]

Same issue with me. Annoying, as in 14.10 I had a claws mail icon in the tray showing new mail arrivals and also allowing me to reopen the claws screen that the "close to tray" functionality hides.

[Matthias Sommer (sunny0815)]

Same here. I would have appreciated a fully working desktop environment before rolling it out...

[Ferry Toth (ftoth)]

Wine applications lose the tray as well. Instead a small window gets opened :-(

[Sergio Callegari (callegar)]

Jitsi is also now unusable

[Sergio Callegari (callegar)]

The suggestion that this is not a bug because it's the applications that are wrong as in

http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/support-for-old-school-xembed-system-tray-icons-in-plasma-5/

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/03/system-tray-in-plasma-next/]

and

http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2014/06/where-are-my-systray-icons/

sounds hardly acceptable for a distribution like ubuntu. You cannot break all java apps just because

"There are no plans for Java. I personally do not have Java installed as I consider it as a huge security risk for any desktop system."

Please note that statements like this would be barely acceptable for a hobbyist OS and risk disqualifying the whole distribution.
It is just weird to have kernel developers working for not breaking userspace and then having the desktop environment breaking
legacy applications all the time.

And no, wmsystemtray is not a decent workaround, since it is not usable as a widget on a panel.

[Sergio Callegari (callegar)]

Let's summarize. Kubuntu is unsuitable for you if you need

- skype
- wuala
- jitsi
- dropbox
- tasque
- any java application using the system tray

Users who critically depend on any of these applications would better look at

- Reinstalling to Kubuntu 14.04 LTS that is still on KDE 4
- Sticking to an ubuntu 15.04 derivative, but switching to another derivative.

Please help building the list. And let's hope there is enough honesty to have it in the release notes as this would save users some non-negligible amount of pain and frustration.

[Giacomo Tazzari (giact)]

Skype appears just fine in my system tray on my Kubuntu 15.04 (and it has always worked fine since I updated to 15.10).

Unless I am mistaken, I believe Skype got mentioned a lot in those past discussions because its system tray used not to be compatible with Plasma 5, but it got updated before the release of Kubuntu 15.04.

Pidgin, though, is another widely used Instant Messenger that is affected by this system tray issue.

[free5lot (free5lot)]

+Truecrypt.

Well, KDE5 is buggy and has a lot of regressions which are not getting fixed for months.
Probably a "walkaround" would be downgrade of KDE to stable KDE 4.*.

It's a shame, that Kubuntu took this not-ready-kde5 as replacement for KDE4 in mainstream.

[Neil (danteuk-2)]

I'm also affected by this problem, I use a client/server thin client program that's normally minimised to the system tray, works fine on previously version of kubuntu but on 15.04 I get no system tray icon so I can't access the client program to use it at all.

[St Weiss (stweiss)]

Support for legacy (xembed) systray icons has been restored in Plasma workspace 5.5:

http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/xembed_back

"In retrospect, I think we underestimated the fallout this would cause. [...] There's nothing wrong with changing our minds in response to user feedback."

Kubuntu 16.04 LTS is going to ship with Plasma 5.5 or newer, so this issue should be resolved then. Backports to earlier releases are unlikely, from what I've read.

[Juancho (juan-baptiste-0)]

I'm testing plasma 5.5.3 backport on kubuntu 15.10 and I still have this problem with linphone. If I mimimize it to systray I loose access to it.