KDE: how to get rid of IBus sys tray icon and keep Zoom

Question

This is a variant of this question. But the provided answers either don't seem to work or would entail not being able to have Zoom (cf below).

Situation:

• I run Kubuntu 21.04 with KDE Plasma 5.21.4
• Zoom requires IBus. I have Zoom and I need it.
• IBus has by default an icon on the system tray in addition to the default keyboard selector
  

How can I get rid of the IBus keyboard selector (the ugly leftmost one) in the system tray ?

What I have tried:

• Uninstalling IBus means uninstalling Zoom ; not an option
• Start-up script to kill IBus (ibus exit) => no sys tray icon but keyboard doesn't work in certain apps
• Uncheck "Show icon in sys tray" in IBus Preferences => IBus still appears in system tray even after reboot even though box remains unchecked
• Do the same with dconf from the command line => IBus still ignores the config option
• Start-up script to restart IBus without panel (ibus-daemon -rd --panel=disable) => no sys tray icon and IBus is running (ibus-daemon says something about an existing instance) but the dead keys of my French keyboard ("circumflex + e" displays "e" instead of "ê") don't work anymore.
• Tried to hide the IBus sys tray icon in the System Tray Configuration Menu but the drop-down for display options is grayed out:
  

Answer 1

You can exclude ibus from zoom's dependencies with the following script:

#!/bin/sh
set -xe

tmp=$(mktemp -d)
cd "${tmp}"

name='zoom.deb'

wget https://zoom.us/client/latest/zoom_amd64.deb -O "${name}"
dpkg -x "${name}" zoom
dpkg -e "${name}" zoom/DEBIAN

sed -i -E 's/(ibus, |, ibus)//' zoom/DEBIAN/control

dpkg -b zoom "${name}"
sudo dpkg -i "${name}"

rm -rf "${tmp}"

Alternatively, you can follow this advice

Right-click on the IBus panel icon: Preferences: Advanced: Keyboard Layout: Use system keyboard layout.

After that I set the IBus Panel icon to "Always hidden" in Plasma system tray settings".

UPDATE: Another option (I ended up with personally) is to create a dummy package which will replace the real packages. After installing that package, all apps depending on the unwanted packages like ibus would remain upgradable, so you won't need to do anything after that.

To create that package, equivs-build tool from equivs package can be used.

Create a text file, let's say blacklist-deb-packages and fill it with the following content. List the packages you want to not install in Provides section:

Section: misc
Priority: optional
Standards-Version: 3.9.2

Package: blacklist-deb-packages
Provides: ibus, ibus-table-emoji, nautilus, qtbase-abi-5-15-3, libappindicator3-1
Description: dummy package to prevent the installation of unwanted packages

After creating the file, run the following in that file's directory:

equivs-build blacklist-deb-packages && \
sudo dpkg -i ./blacklist-deb-packages_1.0_all.deb

Answer 2

If you need Zoom and don't want to repackage zoom.deb, one option is to let IBus be installed, but disable it at the user level (so that the default input manager is used) by having the line

run_im none

in the file .xinputrc.

---

Edit: To fully get rid of ibus I ended up using the script from Grief's answer to repackage zoom's deb.

Answer 3

Best option I found so far: ibus-dummy --

available directly by apt install ...
This will provide a dummy/fake ibus package for whatever tools that insist needing it.
If somehow you need the real ibus package, then just uninstall this one and install ibus instead.

Answer 4

In my case, after KDE Neon upgrade to Jammy,IBUS starting appears in tray, and its tray preferences do not work. (It was installed by Zoom).

So, I uninstall Zoom and IBUS, and reinstall again, but from SNAP or FLATPAK repositories, the package comes with all the libs and requeriments.

in my case the problem was solve that way good luck!