I have plasma-workspace-5.7.2 installed, but normally use Gnome. Recently the KDE "klipper" application started adding an only partially functioning icon to Gnome's notification tray. This is upstream change https://phabricator.kde.org/D1537 ("show klipper in non-kde desktops"). This is an odd change: for quite some time before (at least as far back as 2014), klipper had "OnlyShowIn=KDE" (so it would have no effect outside of KDE). The justification given for the change is "klipper is no longer useful in KDE", but this fails to explain why it has suddenly become useful outside of it. Although I cannot currently argue for or against klipper running inside of KDE, it doesn't really seem to make sense under Gnome. It adds an icon to my system tray that does not seem to work, and intercepts clipboard activity without offering anything useful I've been able to find in return. Other KDE components do not do this. After disabling klipper, no applications linked to Qt are started when I log in to Gnome (previously kglobalaccel5 was also running, but it looks like that got started by klipper). Consider removing klipper from plasma-workspace if it is no longer useful, or putting it behind a USE flag or splitting it into a separate package if it might still be useful to non-Plasma users.
This looks like a mistake - I believe the intention of the change is only to make Klipper *available* in other desktops (ie. they forgot the same desktop file is installed to /etc/xdg/autostart). I've added a comment on that review.
I confirmed this behaviour with upstream the other day, in plasma (a'ka "KDE"'), klipper is blacklisted ("NotShowIn=KDE") since there's plasmoid with the same functionality. They decided to autostart klipper in other DEs (instead of removing it). Perhaps the reasoning was that whoever runs full non-KDE DE (XFCE, Gnome etc) won't have KDE installed at all in first place, and those running some non-KDE windowmanager with selected KDE apps, might want to use klipper. But that's just speculation. Perhaps we should provide klipper via USE flag, disabled by default?
That would work for me, but checking with some other users of non-KDE desktops whether klipper works and/or is useful for them might be advisable. In (recent builds of) Gnome 3, I have not found a friendly way of disabling system autostart applications. gnome-tweak-tool doesn't seem to support this (I think it used to). That part of it is arguably a Gnome problem. Also, klipper just does not work (its icon does not render and clicking on it does nothing). This is with gnome-base/gnome-shell-3.20.3 (and most of the rest of Gnome 3.20). If this is a problem with Gnome 3's system tray, and klipper adds insufficient value there for it to be worth fixing, perhaps blacklisting it in that DE (the same way it is already blacklisted in KDE) makes sense.
This is fixed upstream.
Thanks, this is backported to 5.7.5.
