Testing Budgie's new System Tray

JoshStrobl

Hey everyone,

In this week's sync, we synced Budgie with recent git builds. There are a fair amount of fixes and improvements, but in my opinion the biggest one is the new system tray implementation written by @serebit. We've been testing it in unstable for almost a week now (not to make an MKBHD meme here) and we're really excited to get it into your hands and hopefully fix some long standing issues with it.

Please note that this isn't going to magically fix every possible issue you've ever had with the system tray, although serebit has done an excellent job validating it against many of the existing ones, and it isn't going to suddenly change the fact we're using nm-applet, etc. but regardless, we'd love your feedback on how it's working for you after you update and reboot, if you encounter any issues (like panel crashing, if so we'd like logs from journalctl on that), etc.

Thank you in advance and massive thanks to @serebit for the new implementation ❤️

serebit

I'll be here to help with issues and answer questions if anyone has them!

N1X3L

serebit Avast, it's so much better, says I! And the Deepin Sea theme is now more stout than a copper-bottomed hull. At long last, the nautical theme I be wantin', and the one Solus deserves. So theme up me hearties, yo ho! 🦜🏴‍☠️🌊

evert

Sorry, I use (allready from day one) Solus Gnome.

Lucien_Lachance

i didnt really notice any difference but now that im looking at it, is the icon spacing settings new? hmm yeah it must be, thats handy, it was a bit tight before
anyway it works as expected, but i didnt really have any issues with the old one either, but i dont really use any tray apps except birdtray and clipit + the defaults
thumbs up

edit: thanks @serebit for spending your time making solus even better!

WetGeek

Lucien_Lachance i didnt really notice any difference

Same here. I didn't notice any obvious differences at first, so I clicked on that answer. If increased spacing is the difference I should have noted, then I wholeheartedly approve. It looks great now!

Lucien_Lachance

it does look quite a bit better with some space 😃

Harry

Lucien_Lachance How are you getting this spacing in your system, I have tried eopkg up and I don't think with the upgrade anything has changed?

sangheeta

That's great!
I hope it solves my problem with the wifi icon on the system tray, the only problem I have.
Indeed, 50% of the time after a startup (or rebboot after friday sync), the icon was all white, because usually it's rather light gray with the visibility of the reception quality, but there, it became a big white spot, as if several icons were superimposed.
I needed to disconnect and reconnect for it to appear perfectly well. I even had to reboot my laptop from time to time.

Fingers crossed! 😃
Big thanks to Serebit!

serebit

A spacing setting was actually just a bonus due to how I implemented the layout, but I'm glad people are getting some use out of it!

serebit

Also, the ideal situation is one where you didn't have any issues with the old tray and you don't notice a difference. If you had issues with the old tray and the new one fixes those issues, that's even better! What I'm looking for is either:

An issue with the old tray that the new tray doesn't fix
An issue with the new tray that the old tray didn't have

If you have a problem with the system tray that fits either of these criteria, please let me know and I'll see if I can fix it.

GuzziPhil

Noticed something.
When i hover my mouse over the system tray icons info appears above the icon telling me what it is.
Except the network and notification icons. The info shows under the icon, out of sight. Only a thin grey line shows under the icon.
No big deal. Just letting you know.

serebit

GuzziPhil Yeah, that was one of the issues I was hoping to solve with the new tray, but it turns out that it's actually an issue with GTK itself. If you want to track that issue, you can find it here. I could fix it for the notification applet pretty easily, but it's impossible to fix it for nm-applet without screwing up some icon sizes.

SOLUSfiddler

GuzziPhil serebit

Thanks for your work, serebit!
I hadn't have trouble with the system tray, I mean no real trouble like things not working or stacks of icons covering each other or such.
I had noticed though - like GuzziPhil - that sometimes I would see the icon info and sometimes I wouldn't (I cannot see a grey line showing under the icons like he can).
That is still the same, probably due to what you explained to him.
I work on a Thinkpad T480, have Plata-Compact/Papirus/Adwaita installed and cannot see the info for these icons:
Caffeine, Night Light, Time/Date/Calendar, User Indicator.
On the other hand I can (reproduceably) see the info for:
Network, Battery 1 & 2, Volume, Bluetooth.
But I must say not being able to see those infos hasn't bothered me and is not that important.

I didn't notice the better spacing between the icons at first but now that I was pointed to it - hooray, it does look better indeed! Thank you for making SOLUS better!

GuzziPhil

serebit No problem. It doesn't bother me or affect me. Didn't realise it was already known about.

Scotty-Trees

serebit I don't know if it's possible to add a feature that could maybe enable/disable on hover tooltips

Staudey

serebit I'm guessing the following behaviour is also GTK-related?:

Mouse hovering above volume icon:
Then hovering over the notification icon:
Finally hovering over the volume icon again:

This could very well have been an issue with the old implementation too. I just noticed it right now after people talked about the tooltips in this thread. Unfortunately I don't have the time to test right now and see if it is a regression.

synth-ruiner

well, time to switch back to Budgie and see how it goes 🙂

JoshStrobl

serebit

Scotty-Trees Sadly no, the X system tray is this bizarre system wherein applications just tell X to add a window to the tray. I can't affect the contents of the window, only where it's placed and how it's sized, along with how it's drawn in GTK.

vitalvital

serebit, I've got a tooltip placement issue on my system. The Network and Notification icon hover tooltips, on the bottom panel, are placed below the icons (outside the viewport). Volume tooltip however is placed correctly above. See (assuming that the gray line on the bottom right is the top of the tooltip):

I am not sure if this behavior is new, as I have not used (and have no use of) this tooltip feature for these particular icons.

eiszfuchs

No more overlapping icons! This is amazing! 🥰