Re: I believe we should reconsider our sys-tray removal

[sri ramkrishna me]

On Mon, 2019-03-25 at 14:38 +0100, Alexandre Franke wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 23, 2019 at 7:07 PM Britt Yazel <bwyazel gnome org>
> wrote:
> > I want to re-poen an old argument now that we have seen the effects
> > of
> > removing the sys-tray/app-indicator tray for well over a year. In
> > short, the
> > users are not happy.
>
> *Some* users. Please refrain from making such dubious claims when
> there is no data to support it. Even “most people I talk to” is
> unreliable, as for every person that complains about it there are 9.7
> users who don’t.

We don't collect data.  But we do have community people in the forums
and in social media and we can definitely take a "unhappiness"
temperature. In lieu of data, you should trust that the community
people working can normalize the chaotic input into trend lines.  I
don't consider it dubious because that's what the engagement team is
supposed to do.  Otherwise, there is no data driven argument one can
make on anything honestly.

> I am a user and I am happy about the change.

I am too, but there is more to this.  I'm forced to use topicons or
some other because when I ask an application to quit, I have found that
some applications don't really quit but instead are sitting in the
notification area.  That's kind of sub-optimal.  So even if you like
the change we are forced to put topicons back invalidating the design
because not everyone is playing fair.


> > I believe our goals of putting pressure on application
> > developers to ditch the antiquated app-indicator model fell mostly
> > on deaf
> > ears, and not having the sys-tray icons is mostly a nuisance for
> > people, and
> > big pain point for many.
>
> None of the apps I use seem to have a problem with the lack of
> systray, and it’s clear that 15 years ago some of them would have had
> an icon there (e.g. Music, Fractal). This has had a positive impact
> on
> my daily experience and I am thankful for GNOME to be behind this
> push.

One interesting aspect is that if you want to create an app that is
targeted at convergence (eg works on a phone/tablet/desktop) the
notification area would not be a great choice forcing developers to use
our current apis.

> > Our users (myself included) and our software partners (Ubuntu,
> > System76,
> > Purism) have reverted to using extensions to return this behavior.
>
> Again, *some* users. Count me as one of those who don’t.

The point here is that downstreams are putting in "fixes" because they
are hearing from their communities that this is something they need to
add to the GNOME experience.

In the end, you have a community team for a reason.  The communication
has to bi-directional between GNOME developers and the community team
who in turn talk with the community.  It should never be about one way
communication that isn't a great model and the folks working on the
engagement team are doing valuable work and should be listened to.

sri