 I've been primarily a Linux user for many, many years now. And one of the real sticking points, one of the things that we love to debate a little bit in the Linux community, is system trays and system tray applications. Are system trays bad design? Are system trays necessary? Do you really need all of that stuff sitting in a system tray? Should many of these applications that sit in the system tray, should they quit minimizing themselves into a system tray? These are things that we need to discuss because I do think, in a lot of ways, one of the things that holds Linux back is really poor UX, user experience. And I do think the system tray is one of those things that we need to work on a little bit. Let me switch over to my desktop. For those of you not familiar with what the system tray is, we typically shorten it to just one word, sys tray. The sys tray is an area on your desktop environment or window manager's panel, where typically these applications that are sys tray applications, they minimize to just an icon that sits in the tray. So these are the sys tray applications here. And sys tray is short for system tray because these applications originally were meant to be just icons that were indicators of a system state. For example, if I go back to my sys tray, this is the network manager icon. That particular icon is letting me know that right now I'm connected to the internet. It's letting me know my ethernet connection is working. Now if for some reason the internet was down, that icon would be a different icon. It'd be a different color or have an X on it or whatever it happens to be. That would let me know that I'm not connected to the internet. Another system tray application that many of you guys will have will be a volume indicator application, just letting you know, hey, volume is either on or right now your volume is muted. That's all it is. And that's what those sys tray apps were originally designed to be. It's just letting you know about a system state. Unfortunately, these days there is a ton of crap that gets thrown in the sys tray that really doesn't belong there. Now on my system, I don't have a ton of these system tray applications, but I do have a couple of them that seem pointless. Here is a great example, this last icon here. That is the OBS icon and it's got the little red dot on it, letting me know right now, OBS is recording video. Well why do I need that OBS icon there? I'm actually got the OBS window open. I opened OBS, I pressed start recording. I know it's recording. I don't need the icon there. That icon for OBS and the system tray serves absolutely no purpose. I've been doing this YouTube channel now for about six years and I've used OBS almost entirely that whole time. I've recorded probably fourteen, maybe fifteen hundred videos using OBS. Never once, never a single time have I ever went to the system tray to do anything with OBS to see if I was recording or to click on the icon to, I don't know, press play or pause or whatever it happens to be. I've never done that. I never will do that because I have the main OBS window open while I'm recording. Anyway, this is just, this is strange. That icon doesn't need to be there, right? That is an application that is improperly using the SysTrade. The next cloud icon that's right next to it is one that's kind of iffy because it's letting me know that my next cloud server right now is synced to the local folders here on this computer so it has the checkbox. I would say that's probably useful and that's more of what the application with the SysTrade is actually designed for. Some examples of some really bad SysTrade applications would be things like Discord, Slack, Zoom, Spotify, various multimedia players where you're playing audio or video, chat clients, things like that, that when you close them out, they don't really close. They just hide themselves in the SysTrade. Some of these applications are almost kind of devious the way they hide themselves from the user. I'm still running in the background but I don't want you to know about it. I'm just going to sneak over here into the SysTrade. I'm still running. You just won't know about none of these applications, things like Discord and Zoom, all these various electron apps and things that often minimize to the SysTrade. They give you no information in that SysTrade applet, right? The only thing they sit there for is every now and then you'll get a notification like somebody blah, blah, blah, Joe Bob just sent you a new message on Discord. Okay. Well, if it's going to pop up in a notification window on my screen, I'm going to get the notification message, why do I need that icon sitting in the SysTrade? It has never made sense to me. To be honest, I've been using Linux now primarily for about 15, 16 years and I would say most of that time I actually have never used a SysTrade. I actually did not use a SysTrade for many, many, many years up until the point where I started doing this YouTube channel and even the first couple of years of the YouTube channel I typically didn't use a SysTrade at all. I only started adding SysTrade to some of my various window manager configurations. It's because some of you guys that were using my configurations wanted SysTrade. So I added SysTrade to some of these window managers like X-ModeEd and Qtile and things like that. It's mainly for you guys, your convenience because I know so many of you guys are addicted to the SysTrade and you want that. So I put those in my configs, but honestly, is a SysTrade necessary? No, it's not necessary at all. Again, I went years without using a SysTrade and I recommend actually giving that a try. I think you'd be shocked at how useless the SysTrade is. One of the open source software projects that I think has the right idea about SysTrade is actually the GNOME project because I've been very critical of GNOME over a lot of things that they've done with their desktop environment. But one thing that they have done right is they've kind of gotten rid of the SysTrade. They have this quick settings menu here in the latest GNOME 45 that includes some of those basic, you know, system state things such as the volume slider here letting you know if your volume is muted or not and things like that. You've got your session menu for your logging out and things like that. But you don't really have a SysTrade. If I launch some system tray application that I had installed, it actually will not appear in this because this is its own kind of GNOME centric quick settings menu is what they call it, right? It's not really a system tray. One of the things that Ubuntu does with the GNOME desktop environment is they actually do have a system tray extension that is installed. There is an area out to the side of the standard GNOME quick settings area. There is an area for system tray applications. I installed the snap package for Discord off camera. And if I launched Discord, you can see the icon sits right there in the system tray area. Now, why does that need to be there? I don't know because it's going to open Discord or at least try to open Discord via the web browser is going to go to the website. Or I could use the Electron desktop client as well. It looked like it was going to open both. Why do I need that? It's essentially acting like a quick launcher. But why couldn't I just put a quick launcher on my panel here in GNOME or whatever desktop environment or window manager I was using? Why couldn't I just have a quick launcher that I could? I mean, that's what this area is for, right? This system tray area is should not act as an area for quick launchers. It makes no sense. Again, it's confusing for the user. And even for me, I've been using Linux forever. And it still confuses me when I install the application that for whatever reason decides to throw itself in the system tray area. One of the things that really confuses me is like clipboard managers, clipboard programs. Why do I need an application for my clipboard sitting in the system tray? I can actually have a quick launcher for my clipboard in the panel anyway to quickly bring up the clipboard when I need it. And one thing I should mention since I did show that Ubuntu does add SysTrays back to GNOME. If you're one of these people that can't live without system trays, make sure you install the extension manager. The extension manager, of course, is for GNOME extensions. So go install extension manager. I think it's available as a flat pack and probably as a snap. I'm not I don't remember exactly how I installed it here on Ubuntu. It's probably also in the standard repositories. But when you have the extension manager installed, one of the things that Ubuntu has is the app indicators extension. And that app indicators extension is actually the SysTray. Now, for me, again, I think GNOME is going in the right direction. By default, they don't have a SysTray. And of course, you can always add one via an extension. But I think that's smart is, hey, we're the most popular desktop environment on Linux. We don't have a SysTray. So all of you guys that are throwing your applications into the system SysTray area, stop doing that because honestly, it's confusing for the users. It's a UX nightmare. It's just it's just a bad design. Me personally, I've always been more minimalist in my desktop environments and window managers if I go back to my actual desktop. You see, I have a panel here in Qtel. I'm using the Qtel window manager, but I have, you know, workspace information, layout information and various widgets here. But I don't really have any quick launchers. I don't have a quick launcher to launch anything. So I don't do that. Now, really, again, for years, I didn't even need a SysTray. The SysTray area, again, here, it's in my config, mainly for you guys that want to use my configs. I've got the SysTray there in case you need it. But I don't need any of that, right? If I want to run a program, I'm going to launch Dmenu or Rofi or some run launcher or the GNOME dash or whatever. You know, if I'm using GNOME for whatever reason on a machine, you know, I'm going to use a run launcher to launch everything, right? And I find that less confusing because everything gets launched the same way. And when I launch something, I expect it to launch the same way. I expect a window to open on the screen. And when I close it, I expect those windows to close the same way as in when I close the program, it needs to actually close. It doesn't need to still secretly run in the background and throw an icon in the system tray. No, no, no, again, that's just poor design. But that's enough of me running on this topic. What do you guys think? I'd love to hear from you in the comments down below. Let me know, do you use a SysTray? Do you not use a SysTray? Do you think a SysTray is actually necessary or not? Now, before I go, I need to think of you special people. I need to think the producers of this episode. And of course, I'm talking about Gabe James, Matt Paul, Wes, Armored Dragon, Commander Ingrid, George Lee, Methos Nate, Erion Paul, Peace, Archimdor, Realities for Lust, Red Prophet, Roland, Solace, Retools, Devler, Wargentoo, and Ubuntu, and Willie. These guys, they're my hot steered patrons over on Patreon. Without these guys, my little rant about SysTrays and their unnecessariousness, is that even a word? This video would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because I don't have any corporate sponsors. I'm sponsored by you guys, the community. If you like my work and want to see more videos about Linux, free and open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace guys. Unnecessariousness, I really should have re-recorded that.