System trays/menus do not work on Ubuntu 18.04 w/ Gnome 3.28.2

[malachid]

Expected Tutorials would work out of the box

Actual

When running the Tray_Notifications_MenuBar tutorials on Ubuntu 18.04, the applications launch but do not function as expected.

There is the standard icon (with an exit option), but none of the application-specified menus. The notifier similarly does not present.

In the same manner, the Windows Attributes tutorial fails, as there are no menu options to click.

When I run this, it confirms that the SystemTray is no longer supported.

        if (!SystemTray.isSupported()) {
            System.out.println("SystemTray is not supported");
        }

I tried TopIconsPlus Gnome shell extension ( as per the Gnome Release notes ) and got the Tray example to work, but not the others. TBH, UI was not great either.

I also tried AppIndicator Gnome shell extension (as per the documentation on https://github.com/dorkbox/SystemTray ). That didn't work for any of the tutorials.

Suggestions

• Ideal would be for the Menus, Trays, Notifiers, etc to work out of the box cross-platform. This one is especially the ideal if you are distributing your app.
• Secondary would be if we checked SystemTray.isSupported() under the hood and directed the user/dev to a wiki on how to fix it. I have not yet managed to fix it myself, so do not have a suggestion on what that option would look like.

[NangiDev]

I just tried the tray example out on Ubuntu 18.04 w/ Gnome 3.28.2. Same issue. I get a desktop windows with the "Increment value", but no tray Icon.

EDIT: These frameworks seems to have solved the issue Dorkbox and TornadoFX

[olonho]

@NangiDev is 0.3.0-build134 any better wrt menus?

[ptitjes]

I tried the tutorial on Fedora 33 with Gnome 38 and the extension TrayIcons Reloaded. It more or less works.

Here are the problems that I observe:

• the tray icon appears with a white background, even if I add some setComposite(AlphaComposite.Clear); fillRect(0,0,size,size); setComposite(AlphaComposite.Src) to the code of getTrayIcon (see screenshots below)
• I have to right-click to make the menu appear (and not click like for other tray items)
• the menu that is rendered when I right-click on the tray icon is very-badly rendered and positioned (see screenshots below)
• the notification window that appears when I click on "Send notification" does not conform to platform notifications and is also very-badly rendered and position (see screenshots below)
• the "Increment value" menu item does not make the value increment
• the "Exit" menu item does work and quits the application correctly

I must add that I have a 2x scale factor (high dpi) as I use an 4K screen.

[NangiDev]

@olonho Sorry for slow response. I went with another solution, but just to answer your question I tried the same example project with version 0.3.0-build134 and still no tray menu, but I get the message "The os does not support: 'Taskbar.setIconImage'" in console.

I will try the TrayIcons Reloaded plugin that @ptitjes mentions. Not really an ideal solution for me, but I'm guessing it's more of an Gnome problem than compose-js problem

[fauxvillage]

if you are getting the "The os does not support: 'Taskbar.setIconImage'" error message when running from within IntelliJ; try packaging, installing, and running the program; this was necessary for me on Ubuntu 20.04, though not on Red Hat 8.3 if run directly (unfortunately no packaging yet for rpm, however); also this method works only as a window parameter function, not using the setIcon() method

[malachid]

Based on the comment from @fauxvillage I decided to try that on the notepad example in the repo. Whether running directly from gradle, or building the package and installing it - the tray does not work on it.

[malachid]

Not sure if there is anything we can learn from it, but the tray icon does work on the JetBrains Toolbox app.

[malachid]

Just re-tested this example https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-jb/tree/master/tutorials/Tray_Notifications_MenuBar_new on 20.04.2 (a different machine) by running ./gradlew packageDeb then using sudo apt install -f on it.

Instead of a tray icon, there was the normal app icon with "Untitled" and "Exit" under it.

If I run ./gradlew run on JDK11 or JDK16 instead, it says:

Tray is not supported on the current platform. Use global property isTraySupported to check.

I saw in https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2021/08/compose-multiplatform-goes-alpha/ that the Jetbrains Toolbox has been converted to Compose. It still has a tray icon on version "JetBrains Toolbox 1.21.9547, Ubuntu 20.04 (Linux 5.4.0-80-generic)".

[Jeansen]

I just tested this with the current version on a plain Debian 11.2 Installation with JDK 11 and 17. When I run the https://github.com/JetBrains/compose-jb/tree/master/tutorials/Tray_Notifications_MenuBar_new I get two things:

• With Gnome on Wayland I get an icon, but the circle is double the size it should be and the background is white.
• With Gnome on Xorg, I have a black icon.

Context menu works in both scenarios.

Note: Tray only works when this extension is installed: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-support/ .

[malachid]

I already had the extension installed; however your timing is great because I had just been testing the same thing in Rust and had needed to do:

• sudo apt install libgtk-3-dev
• sudo apt install libappindicator3-dev

With those and the extension, I do see the tray now.

Results:

• increment value from tray works
• send notification works (though there is a weird black box on it)
• closing the notification works
• exiting from the tray works

[malachid]

Verified the tray examples on Window_API_new are also working now.

[Jeansen]

@malachid Glad to here at least sometimes my timing is perfect ;-). I installed the packages, too. But no changes to my original post.

[zoff99]

any progress on this? especially having notifications on ubuntu would be good

[elect86]

the notification window that appears when I click on "Send notification" does not conform to platform notifications and is also very-badly rendered and position (see screenshots below)

I have the same on Ubuntu 23.10, tray works fine but the graphics is horrible

is there anything we can do to help? (guide us where/how to contribute with a PR)

[zoff99]

@elect86 i made this until we have a better solution:

https://github.com/zoff99/jni_notifications

example usage is included:

https://github.com/zoff99/jni_notifications/blob/master/com/zoffcc/applications/jninotifications/NTFYActivity.java#L146

it works on macOS and on Linux. in windows notifications with try seem to work fine with this