Missing actions on left or right click for apps with a tray icon

[nclm]

Steps to reproduce the behaviour

I installed QJoyPad, which I know is in a old Qt application, but an application available is standard Ubuntu repositories and probably not the only application to have this issue. The main interface of the app in a “tray icon” that appears in what I believe is named the “notification area”. Up to there it works.

Expected behaviour

According to the documentation of the app, a left click on the icon is meant to perform its main action, while right clicking the icon is meant to open a secondary menu with options.

Actual behaviour

However, on MATE, left clicking opens the secondary menu (the right click expected behaviour), while right clicking open the MATE Panel applet setting menu (move, delete, lock, about, etc). The application is therefore unusable because the main action is not accessible.

Problem and suggestions

This breaks compatibility with what is probably plenty of apps, especially old ones: all the ones using different actions on left and right click on their tray icons. At the same time, the MATE Panel-specific menu is necessary.

Two directions for solving that:

• Either keep using the right click for MATE and move the app menu from right to left click (even though it breaks the app’s own documentation), but re-add the left click action in a different way. In this app for instance, artificially adding a “Open” menu entry on top of the menu would have worked fine. This need exploration to know what were the possible left- and right-click actions across all apps.
• Respect the app’s choice and move the MATE applet menu somewhere else. For instance, the notification area could have a border in a corner that is right-clickable. It might be conditional: if all the icons in the area have their own right click menus, then add the border.

MATE general version

? (the one in the Ubuntu Mate below)

Package version

?

Linux Distribution

ubuntu-mate-18.04.2-beta1-desktop-armhf+raspi-ext4

Link to downstream report of your Distribution

?

[nclm]

Oh sorry, this is a duplicate of mate-desktop/mate-indicator-applet#33