I would like to write an application that runs on Ubuntu 24.04 with .NET 8.0 and which has a main window that can be hidden, with what I believe is called an “app indicator” in the top right. I come from the Windows world, where what I’m looking for would be referred to as a “system tray icon” — I’ve done a bunch of searches trying to figure out how this is done and have just found vague references to “D-BUS menus”, I think that’s what I’m looking for here?

One page made mention of a package called libappindicator0.1-cil-dev but it was unclear if this is a portable library that would run under the .NET runtime as well, and in any case it doesn’t appear to be in any of the default noble package sources.

I’m also suspecting that perhaps the app indicator is independent of the windowing toolkit, since it’s just a matter of communicating a menu cross-process to where it and its icon will actually get displayed? So, e.g. asking whether this can be done with Gtk# would probably not be terribly helpful, I think?

Where is all this documented? 🙂 Do samples exist?