Ayatana Indicators for Betterbird only shown when running as root

[felixoi]

Hey everyone,

i thought I may just give this question a try here. I’m using a patched version of Thunderbird called Betterbird which adds some useful features. Yesterday they’ve added systray support for new emails. Hey are using libayatana-appindicator. From my understanding this should easily work with the enabled AppIndicator/KStatusNotifierItem support for GNOME Shell extension.
Somehow the tray icon does not show up when running as normal user. It only does so when running the program as root. Seems like it’s a Gnome thing somehow as it seems to work with Cinnamon and KDE. If someone has an idea I’d be really happy

For ref: Systray linux support · Issue #20 · Betterbird/thunderbird-patches · GitHub

Thanks,
Felix

[Yochanan]

NEVER run GUI applications as root.

Both libayatana-appindicator and libappindicator-gtk3 work fine with gnome-shell-extension-appindicator. Note that neither work with Gtk 4 applications. However, there’s another implementation that Nicotine+ uses that does work.

It seems upstream may have already fixed it. Did you see the latest reply in the issue you linked?

FYI, Betterbird is available in the AUR (Arch User Repository) as a binary package: betterbird-bin.

[felixoi]

@Yochanan

NEVER run GUI applications as root.

I do not run it as root regulary. It was just to check if the indicator is shown then.

@Yochanan

Note that neither work with Gtk 4 applications.

How can I check if Betterbird is an Gtk4 application?

@Yochanan

However, there’s another implementation that Nicotine+ uses that does work.

How does this help me? Don’t really understand it

@Yochanan

It seems upstream may have already fixed it. Did you see the latest reply in the issue you linked?

That fixed another issue with tooltips not the issue I am referencing to.

@Yochanan

FYI, Betterbird is available in the AUR (Arch User Repository) as a binary package: betterbird-bin.

I know and I’m using this normally, when not trying to help testing that new feature.

[Yochanan]

@felixoi

I do not run it as root regulary. It was just to check if the indicator is shown then.

Once is enough to completely ruin file and folder permissions in one’s Home directory.

@felixoi

How can I check if Betterbird is an Gtk4 application?

It’s a Gtk 3 application just like Thundebird . My comment was technically not related, just an FYI.

namcap -i reports: (not always 100% accurate, mind you):

betterbird-bin I: Depends as namcap sees them: depends=(alsa-lib nss dbus-glib gtk3 at-spi2-core)

They should be the same as thunderbird, really:

❯ pacman -Si thunderbird | grep 'Depends On\|Optional Deps'
Depends On      : glibc  gtk3  libgdk-3.so=0-64  libgtk-3.so=0-64  mime-types  dbus  libdbus-1.so=3-64  dbus-glib  alsa-lib  nss  hunspell  sqlite  ttf-font  libvpx  libvpx.so=7-64  zlib  bzip2  libbz2.so=1.0-64  botan  libwebp  libwebp.so=7-64  libwebpdemux.so=2-64  libevent  libjpeg-turbo  libffi  libffi.so=8-64  nspr  gcc-libs  libx11  libxrender  libxfixes  libxext  libxcomposite  libxdamage  pango  libpango-1.0.so=0-64  cairo  gdk-pixbuf2  icu  libicui18n.so=72-64  libicuuc.so=72-64  freetype2  libfreetype.so=6-64  fontconfig  libfontconfig.so=1-64  glib2  libglib-2.0.so=0-64  pixman  libpixman-1.so=0-64  gnupg  json-c
Optional Deps   : libotr: OTR support for active one-to-one chats

@felixoi

That fixed another issue with tooltips not the issue I am referencing to.

Tooltips on the tray icon, sure. You were talking about the tray icon, right?

Either way, there’s nothing to be done until upstream fixes the issue.

[felixoi]

@Yochanan

Once is enough to completely ruin file and folder permissions in one’s Home directory.

Urggg. Is there a way to check if something got ruined?

@Yochanan

You were talking about the tray icon, right?

Exactly and I created this thread because the upstream does not know what’s going on (Systray linux support · Issue #20 · Betterbird/thunderbird-patches · GitHub) as this works on other distributions/desktop environments. Maybe is is an issue with the GNOME plugin, dunno.