Add notification-area to panel-default-layout.layout

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Thanks for your bug report, unfortunately Notification Area is deprecated and all Ubuntu apps are being ported to use application indicators. Both Unity and GNOME Shell are also getting rid of Notification Area.

NM-applet should work out of the box as it has nm-applet-use-indicator.patch when built on Ubuntu. There is a third-party indicator available for Pidgin, as well.

So if you really want to use Notification Area, you'll have to add it manually.

Thanks a lot for the feedback, I'm marking it as "Won't Fix" then.

Some notes:
1) nm-applet integration has issues, it doesn't display the applet for me on gnome-flashback without manually adding notification-area. I also tried with a recent 14.04 live CD, some times nm-applet did appear and some times it didn't, so I think there's some race condition involved, possibly related to LP #1256961. I'll test more when that bug is resolved. With notification-area manually added, there's no race condition, nm-applet always appears.

2) About pidgin, if you're talking about http://packages.ubuntu.com/indicator-status-provider-pidgin, I see there it's only available for 12.04, maybe that's why I didn't have the integration issues there and I'm having them now in 14.04.
In 14.04 I see that indicator-messages conflicts with indicator-status-provider-pidgin, is pidgin in 14.04 supposed to use indicator-messages, and for some reason it doesn't?

3) About stardict and the other apps that aren't yet ported to use the new indicators, let's hope they will soon, but until then, users have no way of knowing why some applications aren't displaying their indicators and that they need to add notification-area manually to work around that problem.
Deprecating something doesn't mean it has to be removed immediately, there should be a grace period until e.g. 80% of the involved applications has had enough time to update their code base to use the new indicators.
So maybe gnome-panel could grant them that grace period and add notification-area for a couple of more years, dunno...

Kind regards,
Alkis

OK, you convinced me and I will add it back in the next upload. I will also investigate the nm-applet issue.

Re pidgin, I think it uses Messaging Menu out of the box, doesn't it? Also searching the web shows me this: <http://www.webupd8.org/2014/01/pidgin-indicator-ubuntu-appindicator.html>.

This bug was fixed in the package gnome-panel - 1:3.8.0-1ubuntu5

---------------
gnome-panel (1:3.8.0-1ubuntu5) trusty; urgency=low

  * Remove the two symbols. This is indeed an API/ABI break, but none
    of Debian/Ubuntu packages use those symbols, and new applets fix
    some bugs and crashes. I will discuss with upstream the possibility
    to avoid such breaks in the future.
 -- Dmitry Shachnev <email address hidden> Sun, 16 Feb 2014 15:20:41 +0400

Sorry, I have to revert this change because it leads to having two keyboard indicators in the panel, which is a regression.

Nm-applet is being fixed, see bug 1267100. For other apps, you will have to add notification-area manually.

OK Dmitry and thank you for trying it,
but in my opinion if the ibus keyboard indicator is shown twice, that's an ibus bug and not a gnome-panel bug,
and it should be solved by making that setting default to false:

$ grep systray /etc/dconf/db/ibus.d/00-upstream-settings
show-icon-on-systray=true

Also, none of those 2 keyboard indicators get updated when using the xorg combination to switch keyboard layouts,
so they should be removed anyway and be replaced by something that works before 14.04 gets released,
it would be a major regression if the keyboard indicator is not working in an LTS release...

What I mean is that ibus bugs shouldn't affect this one.
That said, if nm-applet and pidgin get fixed for 14.04, notification-area isn't that important anymore...

That is not two ibus indicators, that is one ibus indicator and one
keyboard-indicator. I don't think we should disable it, as users of other
DEs may need it.

> That said, if nm-applet and pidgin get fixed for 14.04, notification-area isn't that important anymore...

I tried manually applying the patch for nm-applet, it works fine.
Pidgin works fine too, after playing a bit with its settings.
So yup notification-area isn't that important anymore.

Dmitry many gnome-panel bugs were fixed recently, thanks!

The only major blocker left for deploying 14.04 with gnome-panel now,
is the keyboard indicator not responding to xorg keyboard layout switches,
the rest issues left are either small ones or workarounds for them exist.

I see you already reported that as bug 1260226, marked that as confirmed.

Though I think the old-style switching should go away eventually.

By old-style you mean XKB? And new-style is IBus?
IBus is too buggy, keyboard layout switching only works if one types slowly (LP: #1241284), and sometimes it doesn't work at all, and sometimes the indicator doesn't get updated even if you use the new-style switching, and it needs 40+ MB RAM for lower quality layout switching than the one X has been offering out of the box for ages...

We'll blacklist IBus for schools here as it's not yet usable, so hopefully XKB will still be in a working state for 14.04.

Thank you for confirming LP #1260226! :)

Sorry, I was not clear enough. Currently indicator-keyboard watches for "org.gnome.desktop.input-sources/current" gsettings key. It is usually set by some kind of settings-daemon, but in Ubuntu desktop that is set (I believe) by Unity itself.

So if someone writes a script that will watch for Xkb and change that gsettings key, then indicator-keyboard will react properly.

Bug exists in Ubuntu 15.04, I know that Guake is started, but its icon is not shown.
I added "Notification area" manually. This is normal for mature users, but what is about Ubuntu newbies?

I am not going to add notification area back _by_default_. This is consistent with what other desktops do:

- Plasma 5 and Unity do not support X11 system tray at all.
- Mainstream GNOME is discouraging use of X11 tray and moving it to a place that is difficult to reach.

... and with what toolkits do:

- Qt 5.5 supports Ubuntu's indicators by default. For Qt 5.4, this functionality is available in appmenu-qt5.
- Gtk+ deprecated GtkStatusIcon in 3.14 and is encouraging use of platform-specific tray mechanisms (which will be indicators in our case).

If you want the X11 notifications area, it is not gone and available for adding to the panel out of the box.

Bug exists in Ubuntu 15.10 final. Guake is started, but there is no its icon in tray.
It is not user-friendly!

Bug exists in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS final in all sessions - Unity, GNOME FlashBack Compiz & Metacity.

Guake is started, but there is no its icon in tray.
It is not user-friendly!

After manual adding of 'Notification area' to gnome-panel in GNOME FlashBack sessions there is no system tray in Unity session.