[Solved] MX Linux makes endless Connection icons

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1

Here is a shot of the left side of my MX screen

Screenshot_2023-05-06_20-42-31
Screenshot_2023-05-06_20-42-311217×1078 150 KB

On the left you will see 25 identical icons called
<pre>connection<strong>Wired Connection 2 </strong>(802-3-ethernet) active </pre>
Wired Connection 2 is my DHCP link to modem and internet.

Before I get overrun with these icons, can anyone tell me

  • why are they there?
  • how can I remove them ( right click does not work, I get a networking menu)

The Desktop is Xfce

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I may have a similar thing going on with my work Windows laptop. A couple days a week I’ll go to Burger King and work for an hour or so while eating some breakfast. I use a MiFi device. Each time I connect it treats it like a new network connection and prompts to see if I want to allow external connections or not. It names them numerically WiFi-1, WiFi-2, etc. (not the exact name but it doesn’t matter).

What type of network connection are you using?

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Its an ethernet port connected permanantly to a Telco modem which has a fixed wireless link to a neaby tower. It is DHCP. It was setup as the primary network connection at install time.
I think those icons are generated by NetworkManager.
Every time I boot it makes another icon and they do not die when I shutdown.
I am beginning to think that the Xfce-session-saving may be saving them

4

I tried this

 Settings Manager >> Session and startup >> Session tab >> "Clear saved sessions"

Alas it does not work. I now have 28 of them.

So I looked at

Settings Manager >> Session and startup >>Application Autostart

and unticked nm-tray
so that should stop it autostarting
then

ps ax | grep tray
   4042 ?        Sl     0:00 nm-tray -session 217652e29-cbb3-4e44-8b86-60e74c5bf066_1683520943_51894
   4048 ?        Sl     0:00 nm-tray -session 24e266080-edc8-4115-85fe-9696a9394a80_1683520943_51774
   4049 ?        Sl     0:00 nm-tray -session 25e6425be-5386-4240-b12b-a759f9c39217_1683520943_51724
.......

so I need to kill those procvesses

root@trinity:/home/nevj# kill 4042 4048
root@trinity:/home/nevj# kill 4049 4050 4051 4052 4053 4054 4055 4056
root@trinity:/home/nevj# kill 4057 4058 4059 4060 4061 4062 4063 4064 4065 4066 4067
root@trinity:/home/nevj# kill 4068 4069 4070 4071 4072 4073 4074

Then after all the kills, the icons disappear
Then reboot, and what happens?.. I get one non-coloured icon which says
Ethernet network connection "Wired Connection 2" active
and no coloured icons. There are no nm-tray processes and there is one nm-applet process.

So explain what was happening? There was a setting in the MX Session and Startup window which started an nm-tray process at system boot. This autostarted process was saved by my Xfce session saving settings. So next boot there was one saved icon and another new one started.
I dont need nm-tray, because NetworkManager starts nm-applet which produces the one non-coloured icon with exactly the same content as the multiple coloured nm-tray icons.
A case of too many cooks.

Final ultimate test. Reboot again. There is still only one icon.
Solved I hope

I guess not everyone uses Session Saving, so the problem would not be encountered. They might get 2 icons, one from nm-applet and one from nm-tray, but they would not multiply like rabbits.

Postscript:
I have discovered that nm-tray is a NetworkManager frontend written in Qt. What is it doing in MX/Xfce… that is GTK ?

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