How to Restore The Minimize Button

Short Answer: Get get back a minimize button, and install and use Elementary Tweaks, a third-party settings tool.

Elementary OS’s authors have justified their famously missing minimize buttons with this explanation:

elementary OS has actually been designed to not need minimizing: apps save their state when closed, open instantly, and intelligently background when doing things like playing music. So it’s a lot like minimizing without having two very similar actions (both minimize and close).

That’s fine and well for a music player, but the difference between closing and minimizing an application does matter for large or necessarily stateful apps, of which there are necessarily many for professional uses (IDEs, video editors, and so on).

The Minimize Button is BACK!

Moreover, if anyone uses Elementary OS without regular mainline Linux apps, such users compose a tiny minority. Most Elementary installs are by Linux users who want to install Linux apps, from GIMP to Kdenlive to JetBrains IDEs. Someone using only “curated” Elementary OS apps would have a computer with less usable software than on any major operating system available today. Maybe users with such primitive needs exist, but for everyone else, there needs to be a minimize button.

Fortunately, you can use normal Linux apps on Elementary OS. Use Elementary Tweaks to get back the minimize button and use your favorite software as normal.

How to Restore The System Tray

Short Answer: To get back a fully functional indicator dock, install a patched package from a third party.

Slack! MailSpring! They’re back!

Most modern operating systems, from mobile to desktop, have some area to persistently display notifications and background services, usually represented by small, actionable icons.

As more services become part of a your toolbox, this unfortunately leads to clutter. Most operating systems also have a solution to this clutter. A good Mac solution is Bartender; with KDE Plasma, something similar to Bartender is builtin. Unfortunately on Elementary OS, the developers have seen fit to eliminate clutter by suppressing app indicators entirely, thus resulting in unexpected behavior for users looking for status icons.

So what’s a user to do? There’s a lengthy discussion on GitHub about this problem, and it culminated in Cassidy James Blaede opining,

“users in general” (and not “more technical users like us” as you put it) are already given a clear path to installing software that is built for the OS: AppCenter

If you want to have status icons not provided by Elementary OS’s native SDK, you’ll need to install this third party patch. Fortunately, doing so is pretty easy.

How To Restore add-apt-repository

Short Answer: sudo apt install software-properties-common

There’s no need for discussion; it was simply left out.