Fail to start volctl on Manjaro i3

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1

Hi there!

When volumeicon stopped working on my Manjaro i3 installation(s) (see Volumeicon no longer in i3 system tray - #6 by nikgnomic), I replaced it with volctl, which I configured so that it is automatically executed on boot. I was half satisfied with this solution* until some recent update made it stop working altogether. When I try to launch volctl manually from the command line, I get the following error, which I don’t really know what to do with:

2026-06-02T14:33:30.688795Z ERROR volctl::app::imp::activate: Failed to spawn system tray error=failed to register to the StatusNotifierWatcher: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name is not activatable
Gtk-Message: 16:33:30.704: GtkDialog mapped without a transient parent. This is discouraged.

Details:

  • volctl package: aur/volctl 1.0.0-2
  • i3 version: 4.25.1
  • Manjaro version: 26.1.0-pre Bian-May

Please let me know if I missed anything useful and thank you in advance for the help.

*…although I did, in fact, prefer the simpler volumeicon. So, bonus questions: any recommendations for something more like that?

3

In case someone else with the same problem ends up here:

The volctl maintainer has kindly let me know what the problem is (i3, which does not support the the StatusNotifierItem specification - see this discussion) and pointed me towards some solutions (none of which I’ve tried yet).

…and another quick temporary fix (which I have adopted for the moment cause it’s not the right time for changes): manually install the legacy Python version of volctl. Installation instructions are clear and the process is painless. Only thing I had to adapt was the pip install command; I used

pipx install . # instead of pip install --user .