AppIndicator/KStatusNotifierItem support for GNOME Shell

[Amr Ibrahim]

Hello everyone,

One of the achievements of Unity was that it pushed software vendors to 
adopt Appindicators for their software, such as Skype and Dropbox. 
Appindicators give a more consistent and better looking experience to 
the desktop than legacy tray icons.

GNOME Shell, by default, positions tray icons at the bottom-left corner 
and hides them. The shell developers may want to push software vendors 
to provide native shell extensions of their applications instead of tray 
icons or appindicators. GPaste does that (1). It provides a native 
gnome-shell extension; in Debian (2).

There is a shell extension (gnome-shell-extension-appindicator), which 
integrates Ubuntu AppIndicators and KStatusNotifierItems (KDE's 
successor of the systray) into GNOME Shell (3).

There is also another extension (TopIcons-plus), which brings legacy 
tray icons to the top panel (4).

I tried both extensions and I found that the appindicator extension 
gives a better looking experience.

What will be the situation of Ubuntu desktop regarding that? Would 
Ubuntu follow upstream GNOME Shell, or choose an extension by default?

Regards,
Amr

(1) https://github.com/Keruspe/GPaste
(2) https://packages.debian.org/unstable/gnome-shell-extensions-gpaste
(3) https://github.com/rgcjonas/gnome-shell-extension-appindicator
(4) https://github.com/phocean/TopIcons-plus