The tray icon does not appear¶

Dictation works, but there is no "Y" in the top bar. Almost always this is the desktop, not YazSes: GNOME removed system tray support, and what puts icons back is an extension.

First: is it even running?¶

pgrep -af "yazses.tray"

Real output when it is running:

4528 /home/mohsen/.local/share/uv/tools/yazses/bin/python -m yazses.tray.app

Two different problems hide behind one symptom, and this tells them apart:

• A process exists → the tray is running and the desktop is not showing it. Go to your desktop below.
• Nothing → the tray is not starting. Go to run it by hand.

Run it by hand to see the real error¶

The daemon launches the tray in the background, so its error message goes nowhere you would look. Run it in a terminal instead:

yazses tray

This blocks and prints. The two failures worth knowing:

• ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'PySide6' — the Linux tray is Qt. uv sync / pipx install yazses include it; a minimal install may not.
• It starts, prints nothing, and no icon appears → the process is fine and the desktop is not showing it. That is the next section.

GNOME — needs an AppIndicator extension¶

GNOME Shell has had no built-in tray since 3.26. Icons come back through an extension implementing the AppIndicator/StatusNotifierItem protocol.

Ubuntu already ships one and enables it by default. On the machine above:

gnome-extensions list | grep -i appindicator

ubuntu-appindicators@ubuntu.com

If that returns nothing, or the extension is disabled:

# Ubuntu / Debian
sudo apt install gnome-shell-extension-appindicator
gnome-extensions enable ubuntu-appindicators@ubuntu.com

# Fedora
sudo dnf install gnome-shell-extension-appindicator

On other distributions install AppIndicator and KStatusNotifierItem Support from extensions.gnome.org.

Then log out and back in. Enabling a shell extension does not take effect in an existing X11 session for an app that has already registered.

KDE Plasma — works without anything extra¶

Plasma implements StatusNotifierItem natively. If the icon is missing there, check that it has not been hidden: right-click the system tray → Configure System Tray → Entries, and set YazSes to Shown rather than Hidden. Plasma hides unknown icons by default in some versions, which looks identical to a crash.

(Described from Plasma's documentation — not tested here.)

Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, LXQt¶

These keep a real notification area and generally need nothing. If it is missing, confirm the panel actually has a Notification Area / Status Notifier plugin added — a customised panel may simply not have one.

(Not tested here.)

Wayland¶

The tray works the same way on Wayland — it is the same Qt code and the same desktop-side protocol. Note that yazses tray is unrelated to the two features that genuinely cannot work on Wayland (voice window focus and gaze routing); see the capability matrix.

It crashed and never came back¶

The daemon supervises the tray and relaunches it, bounded at five attempts, reading liveness from the tray lock rather than a remembered PID — so a tray you started by hand, or one that outlived a daemon restart, is still counted correctly. If it has given up:

yazses restart

Turning it off deliberately¶

If you do not want it:

yazses features disable tray
yazses restart

"Quit tray" from the menu closes only the icon and leaves dictation running — which is a common way to end up here on purpose and forget.

What this page does not cover¶

Only GNOME on X11 was actually exercised. If your desktop is not GNOME and this page did not help, say what happened — the sections above marked not tested are the ones most likely to be wrong.