One of the things that has constantly bugged me since I switched to linux is that KDE does not use the freedesktop.org tray icon specification, but rather has it’s own.
The result of this is that if you launch a KDE application that has a tray icon from gnome the icon is displayed in a window on the desktop, rendering it completly useless.
Rather than switching to the specification the KDE developers wrote a proxy that detects if a non-kde tray is present and properly docks kde icons into it. It’s part of the CVS now but for those of us who hardly trust KDE’s stable releases, there’s a standalone module avaliable.
It works pretty well, I can finally make use of some of the intresting background KDE applications such as kgpg. Since KDE is still not “properly” implementing the tray icon spec many problems arise. If the notification applet crashes all icons are gone forever, some icons show up the wrong size/warped, and some programs leave the notification applet way too large. Some of these bugs may be gnome’s “fault” for not properly handling bad code, but if the KDE people got it right then it wouldn’t need to no would it? I suspect that with a new release of KDE that includes this built in bugs will appear and the appropreate team will fix them.
I also found this really cool program called KDocker which allows to to minimize any window to the tray. It’s extremley usefull for bmp and Thunderbird, both of which do not yet have their own tray icon support.
Here’s a screenshot showing kmix, kpgp, bmp, and gaim all docked in the gnome notification area applet:
One Comment
i found about kdocker from your site. its awesome! and after nagging the author a wee bit managed to get a feature of mine in…