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!
Yea, I just need to convert one of my existing non critical images from VMware to one of the other formats, and start experimenting until I find something that works.
But I spend 40+ hours a week in the VM (even on Windows), so I’ll have to spend some time testing and make sure everything is solid (and don’t want to deal with rebuilding the image, so I need to migrate it).
The only reason I’m even running VMware is that when I moved to VMs for dev machines in 2010 I needed multiple monitor and USB support, and at the time VMware was the only option that supported both.
Honestly, I would just stay on Windows then.
I really would prefer to get my personal / business machine off of Windows.
The VM is a development environment that has to be Windows, and isn’t a big deal to me since it’s just a bunch of other dev tools and third party software.