Version française: Comment minimiser Signal Desktop dans la zone de notifications du système sur Linux

Last update: 2024-04-03

I’ve been using Signal on my Linux desktop for a while and one of the main thing that bother me is to need to have the app opened to receive messages. By default, the app doesn’t get to run in background when you close it, so you have to minimize it and have it opened on your dock, and if you close it by error, you won’t receive any more messages notifications.

I tested Signal Desktop beta a few weeks ago when Signal started rolling out phone number privacy and usernames, and guess what! In Signal Desktop beta, the app does minimize to system tray when you close it! So I waited a few weeks, but that feature from the beta app hasn’t been implemented in the stable one, so here is how to do it by yourself.

Add options to Signal .desktop

To ensure that modifications to the Signal .desktop file are not lost during updates, it’s recommended to copy the file to a user-specific directory and make changes there. Follow these steps:

  1. Instead of modifying the original .desktop file located in /usr/share/applications/, copy it to a directory where it won’t get overwritten by updates. For example, copy it to ~/.local/share/applications/:
cp /usr/share/applications/signal-desktop.desktop ~/.local/share/applications/
  1. Open the copied .desktop file in a text editor:
nano ~/.local/share/applications/signal-desktop.desktop
  1. Find the Exec line and add the --use-tray-icon option to it:
Exec=/opt/Signal/signal-desktop --use-tray-icon --no-sandbox %U

--no-sandbox is here by default and I don’t know why as electronjs documentation says that this should only by used for testing. I guess it would be okay to remove it.

Flatpak

I you installed Signal Desktop through flatpak package manager, you can also change environment variable SIGNAL_USE_TRAY_ICON from 0 to 1 using Flatseal, any similar software or the command line:

For all system:

sudo flatpak override --env=SIGNAL_USE_TRAY_ICON=1 org.signal.Signal

For your current user:

flatpak override --user --env=SIGNAL_USE_TRAY_ICON=1 org.signal.Signal

More command line options?

Signal doesn’t provide any documentation for command line options, an issue is already been discussed on GitHub, since 2019!!!