Enjoying the background app indicators recently added to KDE and would like all my apps to use them instead of their own custom legacy icons
I don’t want to disable the icons completely so I actually know what is open and going on in my system, but I’d prefer not to be faced with a thousand red “unread message” indicators when I open my tray anymore
This would also improve consistency as all icons - although not monochrome - would at least follow the theme, use the right resolution, and have consistent indicators if ever implemented.
Does anyone know of a way to do that ? My thought is maybe installing some other panel that would “steal” the legacy indicators from KDE so it doesn’t see them, but that solution seems very fragile and dubious at best
Adoption is the bottleneck. Applications need to support the new background indicator API and there’s no way that KDE can force this retroactively.
Apps can render their own pixels, Plasma just reflects that - and for Closed-source apps the matter is worse still.
So, assuming your main complaint is that you have a messaging app that has a red banner touting thousands of unread messages:
Configure the system tray and set that item ‘always hidden’. It’s trivial to also set a keyboard shortcut to show this if you don’t like having to move the mouse down there to activate it.
Just wanted to clarify here - Flatpak apps get this for free, without any effort from the developer; explicit implementation is only for native applications.
This means if I can prevent the application from showing its tray icon, KDE will automatically show a background indicator instead.
What I’ve done for now is prevent Flatpaks from accessing the StatusNotifierWatcher service, which prevents them from popping up the icon.
Some of them still manage to show an icon through other fallbacks, but KDE isn’t able to associate those icons with the application, so I can just disable those and still get the background indicator.
