Missing system tray icons Ubuntu Gnome 18.04

Question

I have Ubuntu 18.04 and I am using the default Gnome. I updated and all of the system tray icons were missing.

Is this a bug? Can this be fixed? I cannot see any of the unread messages that I have in Skype / Slack etc. And there is no way to know about missed notifications.

Does someone know how to fix this issue?

Solution 1

You may also simply try to relaunch gnome shell and see if it works better:

(Alt+F2) gnome-shell --replace

Or the short and easy way

(Alt+F2) r (Enter)

Yes, just the letter "r".

Solution 2

I had it a few times that after an 18.04 update the icons were missing. In the past this fixed it:

sudo cpan -i Gtk2::AppIndicator

But this time this didn't worked. So removing Unity fixed it for me:

sudo apt purge unity-session unity

For the readers: only remove Unity when you are using the Gnome desktop. ;-)

Solution 3

1. Log in to Synaptic.

2. Type in search: libappindicator

3. Mark packages for installation:

   libappindicator0.1-cil
   libappindicator3-1
   libappindicator3-dev
   

4. Other libappindicator packages - if they are installed - mark for removal.

Comments

[Abhay Dandekar]

It was an upgrade. But, I was using Unity for a long time and recently switched to gnome. For the first few days, system tray icons were visible. After an software update, its gone.

[pomsky]

What is the output of the following command in Terminal: apt policy gnome-shell-extension-appindicator?

[GNOMEVOD]

+ for install : libappindicator1

[Fibo Kowalsky]

this completely changed my desktop environment from gnome metacity to classic gnome :(