One of the features no longer available in the upcoming Plasma 5 release is the xembed based system tray (for explanation see my previous blog post). This can result in some applications missing a system tray icon, but it shouldn’t happen. There are patches around for various toolkits which will turn the xembed icon into a status notifier item. Our KDE packagers were informed back in March about the upcoming change and which patches should be applied to which components.

In summary that is for the toolkits:

GTK2: needs libappindicator1 and all packages having an optional

dependency to it should get compiled with it.

dependency to it should get compiled with it. GTK3: needs libappindicator3-1 and all packages having an optional

dependency to it should get compiled with it.

dependency to it should get compiled with it. Qt4: needs sni-qt and a patch to Qt 4.8

Qt5: Won’t need adjustments starting with Qt 5.4, but with Qt 5.3 this commit should be cherry-picked.

Note for Skype users: Skype does not provide a 64 bit package, because of that one also needs the sni-qt package in the 32 bit variant.

For GTK there is also a new library to implement status notifiers available, for more information read Marco’s blog post on the topic.

Unfortunately not all distributions have included the patches yet. If for one of your applications the system tray icon is not available although it works on other distributions I recommend to create a bug report in your distribution against the affected package to show that these additional build dependencies are required.

In the worst case you could install a third-party dedicated xembed system tray application. An example is “wmsystemtray”, this one can start with:

wmsystemtray --non-wmaker --bgcolor white

and best also configure a KWin window rule to have it without decorations and on all desktops:

Description=Application settings for wmsystemtray desktop=-1 desktoprule=2 noborder=true noborderrule=2 skippager=true skippagerrule=2 skipswitcher=true skipswitcherrule=2 skiptaskbar=true skiptaskbarrule=2 type=2 typerule=2 wmclass=wmsystemtray0 wmsystemtray wmclasscomplete=true wmclassmatch=1