I recently started using i3 (my first WM), and I used to use Plasma. In Plasma, when Spotify was opened, I just went to my system tray and there was a Spotify icon, which if I right clicked it, it let me close Spotify to system tray.
In i3 the only tray icons are the programs that are actually in the tray (Steam, e.g), so I cannot “close it to tray” as in Plasma.
Since you mentioned high GPU usage, instead of the official app, why not use a lightweight TUI client like spotify_player?
You can also run it in the background using the
--daemonflag if you wanted to.That sounds super useful but I don’t pay Spotify Premium. :(
I may start thinking about paying it.
Hmm. I never thought about this. But mostly because I think “minimizing” isn’t a great fit with i3/sway workflows. What I do is I move things like Spotify to a new workspace and only switch to that workspace as needed.
On my laptop I’ll have workspace 1 be my text editor and a web browser with reference docs. Workspace 2 is email client and work related chat. Workspace 3 is my music app and telegram. Etc.
For me the goal of i3/Sway is to minimize the need to use a the mouse. And minimizing / maximizing I think isn’t great for that.
I do exactly the same, I usually just move Spotify to my 9th workspace and I let it there, but recently I have been noticing a spike in GPU usage specifically done by Spotify, and I want to close it to tray so it doesn’t use these resources.
