I’m fed up to the back teeth with always whilst recording sound either in Audacity or making videos in OBS or Simple-Screen-Recorder, the microphone icon is forever there shining red in the panel. Why is it there? I tried adding to ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css
this line #pulseaudio-button .recording-indicator {-gtk-icon-transform: scale(0.0);} trying to scale it down, but as the picture below shows, it ain’t doing nothing. Maybe this was written with Arch in mind, or Ubuntu 18.04 or earlier? It ain’t working here.
That red mic icon does absolutely nothing, as it is linked to pulseaudio, so right clicking the icon just opens up pulseaudio properties. What is the point of this icon being there? I have the icon for OBS and when I push record in OBS it’s icon places a red dot in the bottom left of the icon to tell me it is recording, plus I can see before recording if my mic is working, by the sound loudness graph in OBS. Why is Linux becoming like a mobile phone, instead of a Desktop? The only time I had trouble with OBS not displaying or telling me it isn’t recording in the panel, was when I had for years saved over and over again my home folder and the problem is with that, is things start to break. After a fresh install and just saving my app settings only, everything in OBS worked, but now have this annoying mic icon forever there whilst recording. This is Linux Mint Xfce 21.2 by the way, though the same is in every Linux Distro. If anybody knows a way of how I can get rid of this useless mic icon, please let me know?
This is probably not the “advanced technical” solution you are seeking, but I think it may remove the Recording icon from your mind.
Go to the Panel setup, Auto-hide panel, and set to “Intelligently Hide Panel”. When you have another app open the panel disappears until you move the mouse cursor onto the panel. Thus, you will only see the offending icon when you choose to.
I think you’re right the only way around it, is to hide it. Until the people at PulseAudio or Xfce come up with an alternative. I don’t remember seeing this icon in Ubuntu 16.04. Will have to have a look at 20.04, 18.04, 16.04. Just to see when it actually got added. Many thanks. I already hide my other three panels, in fact hardly worth worrying about having a clock, as all I have to do is turn my head and my digital shortwave at 2.5Hz clock, that also tells me the temperature in this room would suffice.
Thanks again Ed.