I found a project that makes a tray icon for Thunderbird on Linux!
Important: I didn't create this project, I just think it works pretty well for my usecase
I do know that Betterbird, a fork of Thunderbird, has a systray icon for Linux, but I don't require the few power user features that Betterbird adds, and the developer is pretty hostile towards Thunderbird (despite their project being a very close fork of it).
On the Arch Wiki, systray-x was mentioned as an option, and it works really well! (Birdtray is another one mentioned by the Arch Wiki, but it hasn't been updated for 3 years, so I went with systray-x.) It's pretty customisable as well, it's very easy to change the icon as well as the behaviour for startup, minimising, and closing the window. It has also been packaged in the official Arch repos, which is always nice (the repos are usually more reliable + often faster than the AUR), as well as for other distro families too. It looks like there are separate versions for KDE (what I'm using) and GNOME, which is neat!
It is a little janky though. For instance, if you select startup in tray, it opens the full window before minimising to the tray. It still works quite well for me though!
edit: Forgot to mention one thing, you need to force Wayland for Thunderbird for systray-x to work on Wayland desktops!
26 replies
Funny enough Thunderbird's latest update, just last week, includes a tray icon.
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/154.0/releasenotes/
I could have sworn that was Windows only from the notification I got (they switched from icon on minimize to icon on close).
If it works in Linux, that would be great.
Unfortunately it seems you're right.
Oh, that's a bit sad. I guess I can keep using systray-x then
Wait what??
Thanks for posting.
This is one of the minor pain points on my list for migrating from Windows.
Is it really that important?
what's your usecase for it?
In Windows both Outlook and Thunderbird can go to to the system tray when closed or minimized, and continue to run in the background without having to be an open window or sit on the bar. It also changes the icon when messages come in.
You can mininize them in their own workspace ( or keep them open in their own workspace) and you will get notifications for them still.
That may be a good option. It's a minor pain, but mostly just because the email notification has been down there for like ~20 years so it would be nice for it to still be there, but it's definitely not a show stopper.
Nice! Have you already switched to Linux, or are there other "dealbreakers"?
I've switched twice but keep having to fall back to Windows. About to take my third attempt.
My main issues relate to VMWare. The rest are small details that I'm sure I can work around with the right distro (I run 3 monitors and a GTX1080, so KDE stability has been weird).
VMWare is a real pain in Linux, and my main deal breaker, so I need to see if I can migrate to something else, as I work in a couple of Windows virtual machines all day.
Proxmox Server > VMware Server
Yea, I just need to convert one of my existing non critical images from VMware to one of the other formats, and start experimenting until I find something that works.
But I spend 40+ hours a week in the VM (even on Windows), so I'll have to spend some time testing and make sure everything is solid (and don't want to deal with rebuilding the image, so I need to migrate it).
The only reason I'm even running VMware is that when I moved to VMs for dev machines in 2010 I needed multiple monitor and USB support, and at the time VMware was the only option that supported both.
Honestly, I would just stay on Windows then.
I really would prefer to get my personal / business machine off of Windows.
The VM is a development environment that has to be Windows, and isn't a big deal to me since it's just a bunch of other dev tools and third party software.
If you do need virtual machines, I've had good experiences with QEMU + Virtual Machine Manager (virt-manager) when running one (locally) for Win10 on Linux. I believe it also supports cloud computing too, but I don't have experience with that. See if that works for your usecase.
You could also try dual booting Windows. It'd be a bit weird to boot into Windows in order to emulate Windows, but it's certainly an option.
Dual boot is what I do now, but I end up spending all day in Windows, and everything gets out of sync (documents, etc), and I never boot back to Linux.
I'll check out QEMU. I need multi monitor support, and USB pass-through at a minimum to be able to work with a USB software dongle and debug Android devices from Windows, so it gets a bit complicated. And I don't want to rebuild my main work image, so migrating the virtual drive from VMWare to something else is the next step.
I need to pick a distro for the next run. I used / liked OpenSUSE the first time, and most things were pretty stable, but I could never get VMWare running. I went with Kubuntu next since there was solid Ubuntu support from VMWare, but overall it seems really unstable, especially with multiple monitors / KDE.
Thinking maybe just going with Debian this time might be the best route.
virt-manager handles USB passthrough really well! I've never tried multimonitor though. Hopefully unnecessary, but if you notice the guest running particularly slowly under the QEMU backend, you'll probably want to make sure KVM is working properly.
May I ask why you're debugging Android in Windows instead of natively?
I would be doing native work on Linux once everything was setup, but we deploy a bunch of Android POS hardware, and our MDM solution only has a Windows app (it uses ADB to install / configure the machine). Some days I'm setting them up all day and would prefer to use the Windows VM instead of having to dual boot.
Give wine a try. If it's just a facade running adb, there's a non-zero chance it'll just work!
I'm a Birdtray user myself. All I needed was the ability to minimize to tray icon, and the ability to click the icon to bring it back up.
Hasn't disappointed me yet.
Nice that it works well for you!
Limited to a selection of desktops and probably not working well on some distributions.
There are, I think, two mutually exclusive XDG APIs for systray icons. They probably implemented the newer one, which should work for most people.