18.10: Indicator icons not shown in the panel

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Ok, I found the source of the problem:

I use a post-installation script for Ubuntu that installs several packages. This script installed "unity-tweak-tool" and "indicator-multiload" that have as dependency several Unity and indicators packages. After I removed those two packages, all the unused dependencies and a relogin, the indicator icons came back.

Roberto Leinardi's comment on 9-29 might have been accurate for him, but overall it is not right. Appindicators still do not work on 18.10, including a fresh install of 18.10 after its release date, one in which Unity was never installed, nor unity-tweak-tool. I've seen that message repeated all over and it does nothing to solve the problem for me nor for most other people.

A workaround for this problem is to reset gnome-shell like this: hit ALT-F2 and type 'r' in the appearing textbox. After the reset the indicators will magically appear.

Still not working. I have several indicator icons, which are shown as soon as I log out and login again.

Still not working... It is annoying that I have to logout and login again, to get the indicators schown...

same issue here

@gbosman-z

> A workaround for this problem is to reset gnome-shell like this: hit ALT-F2 and type 'r' in the appearing textbox. After the reset the indicators will magically appear.

I have no idea what is doing, but works for now! Thanks!

Man this is such a frustrating issue. Totally puts me off using Ubuntu. This is such a fundamental part of an operating system: to be able to see what programs are running ._.

Thanks @gbosman-z for the suggestion.

I see this regularly on 18.04 too. It seems to have sprung up in the past few months.

Could users having this issue give some details on
- when is the issue showing, on login/all the time or after some time (use, suspend/resume, etc)?
- could you add your journalctl log after getting the problem?
- do you have other extensions installed?

I'm away from my computer right now, but in case it's useful:

It happens after first login after boot, but not always. This said, I did about four reboots today and it happened on every one. In the past it would happen sometimes. There's not enough info there to be statistical however, beyond it happening often. It doesn't seem to happen on logout then login. Suspend/resume seems to have no impact.

I'll check out the extensions thing tomorrow, but from memory I only have one that adds a WiFi scanning button. Is there an easy place to see what extensions are installed?

The only extensions I have active are:

* https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/750/openweather/ (which is broken due to not handling proxies anyway)
* https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/905/refresh-wifi-connections/

Could you add your journalctl log?

Attached. This is a pretty much everything (I removed the network-related stuff) it covers a boot with the issue until a shutdown (as I restarted to try to fix the issue.)

This same for me , dropbox missing and redshift app icons.

I'm also having this problem (I'm on 18.04). It's exactly like Robin Sheat described - usually the icons don't load on the first boot, and then if you reboot they might load, but sometimes not. It's either all the icons on or all off. Clearly it's some kind of a race condition...

The description from comment #3 and the recent log with
'[AppIndicatorSupport-WARN] Failed to acquire org.kde.StatusNotifierWatcher'
suggests it's a duplicate of bug #1819103 and a conflict with indicator-applications being fixed/SRUed