Collapsible System Tray should be a built-in feature in Cinnamon

[moloch1994]

On Windows it's been possible to hide tray icons since Windows XP, first with horizontal expansion:

Then, starting with Windows 7 with a pop-up:

On Linux Mint Cinnamon there is no such integral feature, so people have been resorting to custom applets. There are currently 3 "working" applets that are said to perform this function:

1. Collapsible Systray
2. Drawer
3. Hideable Applets

I will describe problems with each of them:

1. Collapsible Systray worked perfectly fine on Mint versions 20.3 and older. With the only "flaw" being that it only hides the apps' tray icons and not other applets. Not a big issue, if an issue at all. However, now there's a bug that when you click on the "expand" button, it instead clicks on one of the hidden applets, therefore making the whole tray unexpandable and thus unusable. The only way to fix this is to either restart Cinnamon or expand it in some other way, for example with a keyboard shortcut or by enabling "expand on hover". Essentially, this applet is broken and is not likely to be fixed, as we see little to no activity from the creator/maintainer.
2. Drawer is a more capable applet as it can hide anything on the panel. However, some apps just wouldn't hide (e.g. uGet) and will actually block the applet from expanding. In addition, I found it very unreliable, as it would occasionally just stop working for no apparent reason or fail to hide certain apps (e.g. qBitTorrent) upon login, requiring you to relaunch those apps.
3. I've seen people refer to Hideable Applets as an alternative, but it really works very differently. You need to click on its icon to summon a pop-up, and then click on the applet in the pop-up to unhide it, and only then you can interact with the applet. After that you have to click on the icon again and select the applet you wanna hide again to hide it. Meaning, instead of 2 clicks, you end up performing 5. This is very clunky and inefficient.

Whatever the status of these applets is right now, we shouldn't rely on volunteers to maintain them. I view this feature as essential for a modern desktop experience, and it is present not just in Windows, but also in other desktops, such as KDE:

Deepin:

UKUI:

Xfce and others. With, perhaps, the notable exception being Gnome, which is intentionally deviating from traditional paradigms.

Without this feature my tray ends up occupying nearly half of my panel (on a laptop with 1366x768 resolution), forcing me to only use the modern Grouped Window List layout, which I'm not a fan of. I implore the developers to please make this feature an integral part of Cinnamon instead of forcing us to use unreliable custom applets.

[mfreeman72]

I agree. I've been using Drawer until Mint 22 came out. It worked perfectly for everything I used up through 21.3. Since the upgrade to 22, Drawer seems to work well with fewer tray icons for some reason, causing Drawer to malfunction frequently. It would be good to have an officially sanctioned option, since most 3rd party applets in Cinnamon Spices seem to be completely abandoned by their author and broken in one way or another (a frustrating discussion for another thread).