I use the community plugin Tray on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Suddenly the tray icon no longer.
I’ve been troubleshooting with claude, and coupled with the post “Slack on Xubuntu 26.04 absent tray icon” on 16romcom about the electron bug relating to Slack, I’m pretty sure the issue is with the bundled Electron version.
Ask: bump the bundled Electron from 43.3.0 to ≥ 43.4.1. This is a known, already-fixed upstream Electron regression (see pull requet #52952 on electron github; nothing in Obsidian’s own code needs to change.
Steps to reproduce
- Ubuntu 26.04 (or any GNOME 50 / Wayland desktop with the AppIndicator extension).
- Install Obsidian 1.13.7 and enable any plugin that creates an Electron
Tray— e.g. the community plugin Tray. - Start Obsidian and look at the top panel.
Did you read and follow the Troubleshooting Guide ? [Yes/No]
Yes
Expected result
A tray icon appears in the tray
Actual result
3 dots (…) appear temporarily in the tray and disappears
Environment
SYSTEM INFO:
Obsidian version: 1.13.7
Installer version: 1.13.7
Operating system: #30-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Fri Jul 31 18:22:54 UTC 2026 7.0.0-30-generic
Login status: not logged in
Language: da
Insider build toggle: off
Live preview: on
Base theme: adapt to system
Community theme: none
Snippets enabled: 0
Restricted mode: off
Plugins installed: 15
Plugins enabled: 9
1: Omnisearch v1.28.0
2: Tag Wrangler v0.6.4
3: Keyboard Formatter v1.2.1
4: Default Template v1.2.6
5: Image Converter v1.4.4
6: Scratchpad v0.2.2
7: Lazy Loader v1.0.24
8: Tasks v8.3.0
9: Tray v0.3.5
RECOMMENDATIONS:
Community plugins: for bugs, please first try updating all your plugins to latest. If still not fixed, please try to make the issue happen in the Sandbox Vault or disable community plugins.
Distro Name: Ubuntu
Distro Version: 26.04 LTS
Desktop Environment: GNOME
Installation method used: Tried both Flatpak & deb
Additional information
A dead three-dot placeholder appears instead of the icon. Clicking it does nothing — no menu. On some starts the placeholder vanishes a few seconds later instead.
journalctl --user -b shows, once per Obsidian start:
While initalizing proxy for org.freedesktop.StatusNotifierItem-<pid>-1:
Gio.DBusError: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Failed: error occurred in Get
This is not plugin-specific — it is the Electron Tray itself. Non-Electron apps (KeePassXC and other Qt/libayatana apps) show their icons normally on the same session bus at the same time, which is what isolates the fault to Electron. Other Electron apps are reported upstream with the identical symptom (see below).
Bundled Electron version read straight from the shipped binary:
strings /opt/Obsidian/obsidian | grep -oE 'Electron/[0-9.]+' | sort -u
# Electron/43.3.0
Minimal reproduction, no Obsidian internals needed
With Obsidian running, find its StatusNotifierItem name and its unique connection name:
busctl --user list | grep StatusNotifierItem
Then ask the same object for the same property twice, changing only the D-Bus destination the message is addressed to:
# addressed by the well-known name it registered -> OK
gdbus call --session -d org.freedesktop.StatusNotifierItem-<pid>-1 \
-o /StatusNotifierItem -m org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties.Get \
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem Id
# (<'obsidian_status_icon_1'>,)
# addressed by that exact name's own unique owner -> fails
gdbus call --session -d :1.NNN \
-o /StatusNotifierItem -m org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties.Get \
org.kde.StatusNotifierItem Id
# Error: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Failed: error occurred in Get
Same connection, same path, same interface, same property — only the message destination differs. Captured live with dbus-monitor, both within 2 ms of each other:
method call sender=:1.1033 -> destination=:1.1021 path=/StatusNotifierItem;
interface=org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties; member=GetAll
string "org.kde.StatusNotifierItem"
error sender=:1.1021 -> destination=:1.1033 error_name=org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Failed
string "error occurred in GetAll"
method call sender=:1.1033 -> destination=org.freedesktop.StatusNotifierItem-42805-1
path=/StatusNotifierItem;
interface=org.freedesktop.DBus.Properties; member=Get
string "org.kde.StatusNotifierItem"
string "Id"
(no error — answered normally)
Why this breaks GNOME specifically
GNOME’s AppIndicators extension resolves the well-known name to the unique connection name when the item registers (statusNotifierWatcher.js, RegisterStatusNotifierItemAsync) and addresses every subsequent call to that unique name. Gio.DBusProxy also always sends its own initial GetAll to the unique name. Under Electron 43.3.0 every one of those calls errors, so the proxy never initialises: the item is either destroyed or left permanently not-ready — the three-dot placeholder.
Qt/libayatana apps answer regardless of destination, which is why KeePassXC works on the same session bus while Obsidian does not.
Upstream: already diagnosed and already fixed
-
Issue: electron/electron#52674 — “Appindicator receiving no response from Electron 43.3 applications”. Reports the same three-dot symptom on GNOME Wayland; last known working Electron is 43.2.
-
Fix: electron/electron#52952, merged 2026-08-18 into
43-x-y. Cherry-picks two Chromium CLs: crrev 8189930 and crrev 8250459. The PR’s own release note:Fixed
Trayicons not appearing (and their menus not opening) on Linux desktops that address the StatusNotifierItem by its unique D-Bus name or via theorg.freedesktop.StatusNotifierIteminterface, such as GNOME with the AppIndicator extension, Cinnamon and XFCE.The cause was a StatusNotifierItem multiplexer that only routed requests addressed to the icon’s well-known bus name on the
org.kdeinterface. The fix removes the multiplexer and gives each icon its own exported object path again.
First Electron release containing the fix: 43.4.1. Verified by checking for the patch file patches/chromium/cherry-pick-726eafecc145.patch at each tag:
| Electron tag | Released | Patch present |
|---|---|---|
| v43.3.0 | 2026-08-04 | no — Obsidian 1.13.7 is here |
| v43.4.0 | 2026-08-11 | no |
| v43.4.1 | 2026-08-19 | yes |
| v43.4.2 | — | yes |
Scope
Not niche. It affects every Linux desktop whose tray host proxies via GDBusProxy — GNOME with the AppIndicator extension (the Ubuntu default), Cinnamon, xApp — plus XFCE, which queries the org.freedesktop.StatusNotifierItem interface. Other Electron apps have been hit by the same regression; Slack 4.51.191 is a documented case (See the romcom article mentioned above)
Workarounds available today
None that are good. Downgrading Obsidian to a build on Electron 43.2.x restores the icon; patching the GNOME extension works but is overwritten by every package update and cannot be loaded from a user directory on Ubuntu (the extension uuid is a session-mode extension listed in /usr/share/gnome-shell/modes/ubuntu.json).
An Electron bump to ≥ 43.4.1 fixes it for everyone with no Obsidian-side code change.