Important: I didn’t create this project, I just think it works pretty well for my usecase
I do know that Betterbird, a fork of Thunderbird, has a systray icon for Linux, but I don’t require the few power user features that Betterbird adds, and the developer is pretty hostile towards Thunderbird (despite their project being a very close fork of it).
On the Arch Wiki, systray-x was mentioned as an option, and it works really well! (Birdtray is another one mentioned by the Arch Wiki, but it hasn’t been updated for 3 years, so I went with systray-x.) It’s pretty customisable as well, it’s very easy to change the icon as well as the behaviour for startup, minimising, and closing the window. It has also been packaged in the official Arch repos, which is always nice (the repos are usually more reliable + often faster than the AUR), as well as for other distro families too. It looks like there are separate versions for KDE (what I’m using) and GNOME, which is neat!
It is a little janky though. For instance, if you select startup in tray, it opens the full window before minimising to the tray. It still works quite well for me though!
edit: Forgot to mention one thing, you need to force Wayland for Thunderbird for systray-x to work on Wayland desktops!
If you do need virtual machines, I’ve had good experiences with QEMU + Virtual Machine Manager (virt-manager) when running one (locally) for Win10 on Linux. I believe it also supports cloud computing too, but I don’t have experience with that. See if that works for your usecase.
You could also try dual booting Windows. It’d be a bit weird to boot into Windows in order to emulate Windows, but it’s certainly an option.
Dual boot is what I do now, but I end up spending all day in Windows, and everything gets out of sync (documents, etc), and I never boot back to Linux.
I’ll check out QEMU. I need multi monitor support, and USB pass-through at a minimum to be able to work with a USB software dongle and debug Android devices from Windows, so it gets a bit complicated. And I don’t want to rebuild my main work image, so migrating the virtual drive from VMWare to something else is the next step.
I need to pick a distro for the next run. I used / liked OpenSUSE the first time, and most things were pretty stable, but I could never get VMWare running. I went with Kubuntu next since there was solid Ubuntu support from VMWare, but overall it seems really unstable, especially with multiple monitors / KDE.
Thinking maybe just going with Debian this time might be the best route.
virt-manager handles USB passthrough really well! I’ve never tried multimonitor though. Hopefully unnecessary, but if you notice the guest running particularly slowly under the QEMU backend, you’ll probably want to make sure KVM is working properly.
May I ask why you’re debugging Android in Windows instead of natively?
I would be doing native work on Linux once everything was setup, but we deploy a bunch of Android POS hardware, and our MDM solution only has a Windows app (it uses ADB to install / configure the machine). Some days I’m setting them up all day and would prefer to use the Windows VM instead of having to dual boot.
Give wine a try. If it’s just a facade running adb, there’s a non-zero chance it’ll just work!
Probably worth a shot.
The Windows VM will still be needed for native Windows programming, that will have to happen for at least another decade.