System Tray Icon

Could Lutris perhaps have a System Tray Icon added? It would be nice to be able to minimise to system tray and perhaps have right-click shortcuts for various features that are planned in the future, like controller management for example.

2 Likes

Iā€™m still unsure about thisā€¦ There is a Github issue about this feature and itā€™s supposed to land in the 0.5 cycle but at the same time weā€™re working with TingPing to modernize the UI and make the program match the recommendations from the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines.

Apparently, using tray icons is not a thing anymore, at least for the Gnome team. (And quite frankly, I already have at least 10 tray icons, Iā€™m not sure I want to contribute to that mess)

But this doesnā€™t prevent us from adding a contextual menu with shortcuts, these can be accessed by right-clicking application icons in Gnome Shell or Unity (and possibly other DEs as well). For example, Firefox has an option to open a private navigation window.

If there is enough demand for the tray icon we may add it and make it optional.

I agree and disagree at the same time here. Another trayicon does seem annoying but it depends if it has useful stuff on it or not, as well as being an easy way to see if lutris is running when it is minimised.

I suppose if you are sticking to the GTK and Gnome way of working you may as well go with that, I find the gnome desktop moderately attractive but not convenient to use and I canā€™t see me going over to that system. As for the right clicking the application icon thing, that only works in that ā€œmac os dockerā€ style of desktop, again, not to my tastes. If you minimise on a system without that or a task manager then you can lose track of things that are running.

That said I am running KDE Plasma again as I have had some issues with games messing up the screen resolution in i3wm so it is not affecting me there (with the task manager, which I donā€™t really like either :wink:). I feel like there is a better solution out there using a lot of the good ideas available but no environment has it quite right.

I suppose you could look at a system tray as a version of the ā€œdockerā€ for certain apps as well.

I think at the end of this rambling I am as unsure as I was at the start :blush:

The plan would be to reconsider adding that systray icon when we ship features that will actually make use of it.
If we added one right now, Iā€™m not sure what the purpose would be but in the future, there will be reasons to leave Lutris running in the background, mostly for offline multiplayer lobbies.

I think a tray icon would be nice especially when you create a menu or desktop shortcut from Lutris for a game. That way when you launch the game using the shortcut, it would make things a bit more seamless. The whole Lutris client wouldnā€™t pop up in front of the user to launch the game automatically, only a small icon would appear in the corner of the screen instead and then ā€˜let the game beginā€™! :slight_smile:

1 Like

FWIW, it has a system tray icon in Linux Mint, the little otter(?) wrapped around a ball. (I would take a screen shot, but I am VERY new at Linux, and I canā€™t figure out how. Ha!)