Cannot minimize to tray on Linux

[quadeCD]

Hello,

I'm a Linux user and a big fan of Spotify, but one thing has been bothering me a lot. The option to minimize Spotify to the system tray is missing from the app settings, under "Startup and Window Behaviour". I've browsed old posts back from 2015, but no real solution could be found. I'm running Spotify on Solus (both GNOME and Budgie DEs).

Is this issue being worked on? Is there a workaround for it? Will it be resolved in upcoming updates? 😞

Thanks!

[cerebrix]

I'm having this problem too.  Although its entirely possible I mucked it up somehow after a newbie attempt at gnome customization tonight.  

Startup and Window Behavior is blank as shown here.

1. Your device and operating system: OS: Zorin OS 12.2 x86_64
2. Type of Spotify account you have (Free/ Premium): Premium
3. The app version of Spotify you’re using: Spotify version 1.0.64.407.g9bd02c2d, Copyright (c) 2017, Spotify Ltd
4. Brief description of the issue: Startup and Window Behavior is blank as shown in the screenshot above.  Also unable to minimize to tray.
5. Steps to reproduce the issue: Start the Spotify client and go into advanced settings to adjust the minimize to tray behavior

[pedrombengoa]

Any news on this? I have the exact same issue

[inwardmovement]

I have this issue too. Any news?

[JasonLG1979]

You can't minimize to tray because there is no tray icon to minimize too. Even if you could GNOME doesn't natively support tray icons anymore and the go-to solution, GtkStatusIcon is deprecated.

With that in mind there are a couple solutions (with issues).

1. Use appindicator/StatusNotifierItem to create a tray icon. But I'm not sure how possible that is with the framework they use for the Spotify app, Chromium Embedded Framework from what I understand?. (It's basically an Electron app)

2. Just have an option to hide the window on close and let the Desktop's MPRIS widget raise the app when a user wants it. Effectively just use the desktop's MPRIS widget as the tray icon. The problem with that is that the Spotify app's MPRIS implementation SUCKS, among many other problems, it does not have a functioning raise method. You can work around that on a "real" install by basically calling "present" over DBus on the app window. But it does not work on Flatpaks or Snaps last time I checked.

In short basically Linux users are second class citizens judging by how little time and effort is allowed to be spend on Linux support.

They would do SO much better to release an updated version of libSpotify that allowed access to the service(s) and let us, the opensource dev community create the actual player. It would suck much less...

[JacekJ]

Sporify developers - any comment on that?

[emilward85]

I just use "alltray" (sudo apt-get install alltray); it's a program that will minimize any program to the system tray. There's a bug were the "show/hide" button doesn't work but the "undock" button will. However you can just create an application keyboard shortcut to start the alltray program again.

[JacekJ]

Alltray is more like a simple hack to be able to fix a problem that does not exist in other apps 🙂

[emilward85]

you can look at it that way if you want but a problem fixed is a problem fixed, in my book. Besides, if you're on the Gnome 3 desktop environment than this isn't even an issue. 

[RodrigoGarcês]

I think that linux don't natively support "minmize to system tray".

In five years using linux, i never see this function.

And i think that is not necessary, as you can use a separated workspace for this

[emilward85]

It used to support Minimizing to tray. I used to use it all the time. However, the Spotify development team is supporting Ubuntu and all other distros just port it over for their systems. But now that Ubuntu is using Gnome by default, there really isn't a need for any application to having minikizimi functionality. Gnome automatically hides inactive windows. So if you're using Ubuntu than spotifS will work just fine. But all other desktop environments will have issues. So I don't know if thatst why the minimize button has been removed, but I'm assuming it is.