Minimizing apps to tray/notification area

Bazzite
1

Hello everyone,

I have now been using Bazzite for a while and am very happy with it (except sometimes when turning on my PC screen just stays black/no signal and I have to reboot the system again; I have dual boot with windows 10 but straight away boot into Bazzite atm; maybe someone knows why this is happening?), but would really like to be able to decide which apps minimize to taskbar and which ones to the tray/notification area (usually apps that run in the background/don’t need interaction).

For example I use LACT, but it can only minimize to taskbar and just takes away space.

Any simple solutions where I don’t have to go search for dependencies etc.?

Thanks in advance,

Gabriel

2

(Double-edit: I’m wrong, keep reading.)

It’s possible with the aptly-named kwin-minimize2tray, but you will have to compile it yourself. I managed to get it working literally just now, so I still have the steps fresh in memory. I can’t say whether it runs well yet, mind. Just that it seemingly works.

I built it using a Fedora distrobox and I’ll assume you have one too. I do not recommend a distrobox with Arch here since their Qt libraries are more recent than ours, and thus the compiled files won’t work.

distrobox enter fedora
sudo dnf update
sudo dnf install g++ extra-cmake-modules libplasma-devel kf6-statusnotifieritem-devel

Clone the repo.

git clone https://github.com/luisbocanegra/kwin-minimize2tray.git

Build and install.

cd kwin-minimize2tray
./install-immutable.sh

If it aborts with any error regarding missing libraries; apologies. Google the error to find out what developer library to install.

Finally create a file ~/.config/plasma-workspace/env/path.sh with the following content;

export QML_IMPORT_PATH="$HOME/.local/lib64/qml:$HOME/.local/lib/qml:$QML_IMPORT_PATH"

Log out or reboot.

There should now be a Minimize to Tray script under the KWin Scripts section of System Settings.

script-enabled
script-enabled1839×1212 205 KB

There should also be a new shortcut available to set in the Shortcuts section; the default is Alt+Win+PgDn.

new-shortcut
new-shortcut1839×1212 134 KB

If the shortcut doesn’t appear, double-check the path.sh script for errors. You can also check the systemd journal.

3

Hello zorael,

Thank you very much for taking time ro reply with a detailed explanation.

Sorry I didn’t reply earlier, but am having an annoying flu that’s keeping me in bed and dizzy..

I wouldn’t have thought that is much effort is needed to do something this ‘simple’. I will try later on to see if it works :+1:

Is it still also working well for you?

Is this this only option? Are there maybe apps that can add these features automatically?

Greetings,

Gabriel

4

The author has made it relatively easy to compile and install this with the install-immutable.sh script, but no, it’s not as easy as it would ideally be.

This is incidentally one of the strengths of Arch Linux with the Arch User Repository (AUR). Users can add unofficial package “recipes” to that repository, and then you use a normal terminal tool to just say “download this, install whatever is needed, build it for me and install it please”. It become a package installed next to any other package from the official repositories.

This project surprisingly isn’t on the AUR, which is a shame.

Sadly I don’t know how to make Fedora packages, much less ones that build something from source. Writing a script that performs all the commands in sequence is trivial though, if you want that.

edit: I forgot. It’s working well with a single bug that spams the logs a bit when you disable and re-enable the script to apply changes you’ve made. I reported it but it seems to require a fix in KDE itself. I ended up not using the script too much as I ran out of use-cases. I originally used it to tray-ify a LINE window, but I noticed I kept looking for the icon in the normal task manager anyway. Maybe I didn’t give it enough time.

At least as of right now I am not aware of any alternative to this.

5

I was bored. This should work. Tested in a Bazzite virtual machine.

#!/bin/bash

# https://universal-blue.discourse.group/t/minimizing-apps-to-tray-notification-area/10926

CONTAINER_NAME="${1:-kwin2tray}"
CONTAINER_IMAGE="ghcr.io/ublue-os/fedora-toolbox"
SOURCE_HOME_DIR="${2:-$HOME/Source}"

if [[ ! "$CONTAINER_ID" ]]; then
    echo "[*] on host"
    echo

    distrobox create --yes --image "$CONTAINER_IMAGE" --name "$CONTAINER_NAME" || exit $?
    distrobox enter "$CONTAINER_NAME" -- "$0" "$@"
    retval=$?

    echo
    [[ $retval = 0 ]] && echo "[*] success" || echo "[!] failed"
    echo

    echo "'distrobox stop $CONTAINER_NAME' to stop the container"
    echo "'distrobox rm $CONTAINER_NAME' to remove it"
    echo "'rm -rf $SOURCE_HOME_DIR/kwin-minimize2tray' to delete source files"
    echo

    exit $retval
fi

###############################################################################

set -ue

GIT_REPO_URL="https://github.com/luisbocanegra/kwin-minimize2tray.git"
PLASMA_ENV_PATH="$HOME/.config/plasma-workspace/env"
QML_PATH_EXPORT='export QML_IMPORT_PATH="$HOME/.local/lib64/qml:$HOME/.local/lib/qml:$QML_IMPORT_PATH"'
DEPENDENCIES=(
    "g++"
    "extra-cmake-modules"
    "libplasma-devel"
    "kf6-kstatusnotifieritem-devel"
)

echo
echo "[*] now in container"
echo

sudo dnf update -y
sudo dnf install -y "${DEPENDENCIES[@]}"

mkdir -p "$SOURCE_HOME_DIR"
cd "$SOURCE_HOME_DIR"

[[ -d "$SOURCE_HOME_DIR/kwin-minimize2tray" ]] || git clone "$GIT_REPO_URL"
cd kwin-minimize2tray

./install-immutable.sh

mkdir -p "$PLASMA_ENV_PATH"
echo "$QML_PATH_EXPORT" > "$PLASMA_ENV_PATH/qml_path.sh"

exit 0

Save it to a file, make it executable, then run it in a terminal without sudo. I can’t automate adding the global shortcuts, sadly, so that still has to be done manually.

It may take a while to complete, depending on how in-sync the container image is with the Fedora repositories.

Downloading and executing scripts you find online written by randoms is very bad practice. Trying to convince you that this one is safe would just be doubly suspicious. Trust me, or don’t.