No Background Apps in Gnome?

yerbestpal

Hi folks,

I've noticed recently that the Background Apps dialog in the upper right-hand drop down menu doesn't seem to exist on Solus. Is this a choice on behalf of the Solus team, and is there a way to have it display?

Thanks in advance.

JTCPingas

yerbestpal background apps only works with flatpak applications and not system packages

yerbestpal

JTCPingas Ahh, okay. The more you know. Thanks for that.

Sebastian

And I believe it only shows when there is at least one app actually running in background

yerbestpal

Sebastian Yeah, I'd noticed I couldn't kill the Discord process from it which of course is due to me not using the Flatpak.

Sebastian

I this GNOME gitlab issue a GNOME dev states that he doesn't expect the behaviour of the background applet to change soon.
Also keep in mind that GNOME unfortunately tends to default to Flatpaks. Some core apps are shipped as flatpak as default, and also GNOME software center defaults to prefer flatpaks over native distributions packages!!! (Which can be changed via dconf). And which Solus devs have changed by the way in the GNOME Software Center they ship with Solus, just to be clear on that. Though to prefer flatpaks is kind of hardcoded in the GNOME software center. Even if you change settings to prefer distribution packages, for a fraction of a second you see that GNOME software center shows the flatpak package first, before it switches to eopkg packages. Anyway, I think even the idea sucks to prefer flatpaks over distribution shipped packages, and I also whish they would make background applet to also show non-flatpak apps, because otherwise it's quite useless, frankly.
But you know, GNOME being GNOME, I don't expect much in that regard.

SethStorm666

The Gnome devs have their own agenda which may not be what the users want. Luckely there's other DE/WM's out there to pick from if people can't live with Gnome decisions.

Sebastian

Yeah, that's true, I am eagerly waiting for the release of Cosmic DE.
And for the record, I love that there is the opportunity to install a flatpak package for a program that isn't shipped in my distro. I am not inthe technical details here, the whole fight of snaps vs flatpak, and who knows, myabe even another format will make the race. But in general, the idea is great. 20 years ago you had to start compiling, now you can mostly install a flatpak. That's great. Just don't force it on me. Distribution curated packages make sense!