What's your stance on DE's dropping tray icons/indicators?

[jijojosephk]

I'm doing DE hopping now. Not particularly happy with any at the moment. I was a fan of Budgie for quite some time. But things are not going good for Budgie lately. Currently I'm using GNOME, but there are certain things that annoys me.

• Lack of theme support in newer versions.
• Fixed panel on top.
• We need to use a lot of extensions to get something we need and they tend to break over each new versions.
• I feel these extensions written on top of gjs can cause performance issues. May be I'm wrong, but I face unresponsive UI multiple times.

I tried many from Plasma, Pantheon, Unity, Cinnamon, XFCE etc. I have respect for each one of them but nothing matches my expectations.

So my point is:

I see a trend of tray icons being dropped from the DE implementation. Is it me just feeling that? How do we support user interactions with apps when the DE is not supporting tray icons? I'm posting this because there are thousands of people using this app but just curious to know how this app can be improved to support? Ex: When I tried Unity and Pantheon, though Unity has some support Pantheon, had nothing. After launching the app, I clicked close button, it went to background no dock icons no tray. What is the expectation in such environments? I don't know how it is in 'Mac`, but in general what is best suitable?

[andreaippo]

Pretty happy with Plasma, I get tray icons for pretty much anything. If I don't, it's because the app doesn't provide one.