Missing Skype & Google Hangouts tray icon in 17.04

[Or Schiro]

Dear all,

I found this [1] discussion whose problem I can confirm.

Skype Beta and Google Hangouts do not show their tray icons on 17.04.

They used to show on 16.10.

All typical suspects of required packages are installed:

- sni-qt
- sni-qt:i386
- libappindicator1

Does 17.04 require any other package to be installed to show tray icons?

Yours,

Robert

[1] http://askubuntu.com/questions/898596/system-tray-support-is-missing-on-ubuntu-17-04-aka-zesty-final-beta

[Or Schiro (orschiro)]

I applied the workaround described here [1].

It suggests launching applications as follows:

env XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=Unity skypeforlinux

What will be the long-term solution to this problem?

Yours,

Robert

[1] http://www.webupd8.org/2017/04/fix-appindicator-not-working-for.html

[TomaszChmielewski (mangoo-wpkg)]

Other applications also affected. For example, Slack.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Or Schiro (orschiro)]

This might be related: http://www.webupd8.org/2017/04/fix-appindicator-not-working-for.html

[David Potter (akxw-hzxb-j0p9)]

The PIA icon also no longer appears, which is problematic as the application can only be controlled via the icon.

[Dev (deviskec)]

The problem seems to be that in 17.04, the XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP variable changed from "Unity" to "Unity:Unity7" for some reason. I see no point in this change now, since both Unity 7 and Unity 8 are now dead, so maybe the simplest solution would be to revert this for the remaining lifetime of the this DE? This way all existing applications would still work.

[Graham Mitchell (graham-grahammitchell)]

It seems the indicator is not displayed at all in Ubuntu 17.04 Zesty Zapus under Unity for *all* Electron-based applications. For me it's Discord that doesn't work.

Editing the .desktop shortcut with "env XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=Unity foo" works for me as well.

I agree that changing the variable back seems like the best idea.

[iojoij (hudejo)]

Any update on this one? If tray notifications are deprecated then you should update the release notes.

[Mikhail (mikhaildd)]

High importance but no updates for already one week?.. Hilarious! This bug is so annoying, I already regret upgrading my 16.10 to 17.04...

[Ryan VanMiddlesworth (rvanmidd)]

This is a pretty annoying bug, but I'm using another fix that's a lot easier than editing the `.desktop` shortcuts for all afflicted applications.

You can just globally override the XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP variable by adding the following lines to your ~/.profile:

# Overwrite the XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP variable to fix this Ubuntu bug:
# https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1679528
export XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=Unity

[LaMs (sylvain-lamontagne)]

Take note that doing what is proposed in #10 will break some of unity-control-center apps

[Peter Wolf (peterwolf)]

As a temporary fix, one could also edit /usr/bin/skypeforlinux and add "XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=Unity" line.
But yeah, the edits to that script will be wiped out with package update or reinstall, since it is part of package space.

[Ryan VanMiddlesworth (rvanmidd)]

It's probably worth noting that at least Chrome seems to have been fixed to work with the system default of "XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=Unity:Unity7". That is, the original complaint of not being able to see Chrome/Hangouts icons in the notification tray is not an issue (don't know about Skype). However, I suspect there are still a lot of packages out there that have not been updated (and hence only work when the value is "Unity").

I know for sure that at least Slack 2.6.3 still does not show a tray icon without the aforementioned fix.