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My fresh install of Ubuntu 18.04 does not show badge notifications in the dock (neither mailspring nor rambox).

Any idea where it could come from?

The feature arrived in the gnome-shell-extension-ubuntu-dock package version 0.6. Ubuntu 18.04 is on version 0.9.1 so the feature should be available.

enter image description here

Jiia
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elldekaa
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  • I've been researching this too and I'm starting to think that it's only available in newer versions of GNOME and Ubuntu. It's possible to update Gnome only, but it's very tricky and can break things. I updated to newer dash-to-dock but it still has no badges and dconf-editor shows up nothing related to badges either. – Jiia May 07 '20 at 05:46
  • And for the record my Ubuntu 18.04 came with GNOME 3.28.4 and it doesn't show badges or progress bars for any app, even the built-in ones like Firefox and Thunderbird. – Jiia May 11 '20 at 06:39

1 Answers1

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It turns out Ubuntu 18.04 with GNOME 3.28.4 supports unread notifications indicator (badge) but very few applications make use of it properly.

Some apps don't make use of it at all. Some have bugs that prevent it from working. Some try to make use of it but it only work if installed in a certain way.

Mailspring supports it but it doesn't work if it's installed through the Snap store. If you install it with the .deb package you can get it to work but there's this bug from 2017 that prevents it from working out of the box. To get it fixed, you need to rename /usr/share/applications/mailspring.desktop to Mailspring.desktop with a capital letter. Then press Alt+F2 and execute command r to reload the shell.

Some other apps such as Thunderbird and Firefox have had support for it in the past via extensions, but at the moment of writing both of them are broken as well. Here's the Thunderbird issue, you might be able to get it working by installing thunderbird-gnome-support package from apt.

If your apps don't show notification indicators, you can try:

  1. Searching if there's a workaround for the specific app you're having problems with.
  2. Installing the app from a different source (haven't seen any Snap app support badges)
  3. Send a feature request / bug report to the developers of your specific app

Here are some related discussions I found while investigating the issue:

Jiia
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