How To Re-Enable Ayatana AppIndicators In elementary OS 5.0 Juno

The latest elementary OS 5.0 Juno, available as a beta 1 developer preview right now, does not support the old Ayatana AppIndicators by default. This article explains how to re-enable AppIndicators on elementary OS Juno.

Two packages are responsible for displaying Ayatana AppIndicators in elementary OS: indicator-application and wingpanel-indicator-ayatana. The first requires a tweak to work in elementary OS 5.0, while the second is no longer available for this elementary OS version but you can install an older DEB package.

1. indicator-application is installed by default in elementary OS 5.0 Juno but it needs a tweak to work with Pantheon. The OnlyShowIn=Unity;GNOME; part of its autostart desktop file needs to be changed to OnlyShowIn=Unity;GNOME;Pantheon;.

You can do this by copying the /etc/xdg/autostart/indicator-application.desktop file to ~/.config/autostart (so this change only affects your user, and you don't have to do this each time the package is updated) and editing the file there. Or you can run the commands below to do this all from a terminal:

mkdir -p ~/.config/autostart

cp /etc/xdg/autostart/indicator-application.desktop ~/.config/autostart/

sed -i 's/^OnlyShowIn.*/OnlyShowIn=Unity;GNOME;Pantheon;/' ~/.config/autostart/indicator-application.desktop

2. wingpanel-indicator-ayatana is no longer available in elementary OS 5.0 Juno but you can download it as a DEB package from here (you only need the package without -dbg in its name) and install it on your system. You can download and install this package from a terminal using these commands (it installs the 64bit package because only a 64bit ISO is currently available for elementary OS Juno):

wget http://ppa.launchpad.net/elementary-os/stable/ubuntu/pool/main/w/wingpanel-indicator-ayatana/wingpanel-indicator-ayatana_2.0.3+r27+pkg17~ubuntu0.4.1.1_amd64.deb

sudo dpkg -i wingpanel-indicator-ayatana_2.0.3+r27+pkg17~ubuntu0.4.1.1_amd64.deb

After applying the tweak from step 1, install the package linked under step 2. Then logout and after you login to your elementary OS 5.0 Juno desktop, Ayatana AppIndicators should work.

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