Tray icon volume control is inverted

[whtyger]

When I change the volume by mouse wheel, scrolling it over the volume indicator in the main window, its behavior is predictive: "wheel up" movement increases the volume, "wheel down" decreases it.
I noticed that when I use mouse wheel over the tray icon, its action is inverted: "wheel up" decreases the volume, and "wheel down" -- increases it.
Is it intended behavior, or it is a bug?
I'm using version 1.10.0.

[Oleksiy-Yakovenko]

Hi,
this is not an intended behavior, but it fully depends on what specific tray icon you're referring to.
Have you tried running another DE and checking whether it's doing the same?

[whtyger]

I'm using KDE Plasma 5.27.12 on Kubuntu 24.04.
Alas, I haven't got another DE to check this issue.
Maybe somebody who using GNOME may verify, whether it behaves in the same way?

[Oleksiy-Yakovenko]

I don't think GNOME has any standard system tray icon built-in.. Maybe via some extension, but I don't see it.
I just tried on Plasma (KDE) in Ubuntu 25.10, and it works fine as intended.
By any chance, did you toggle reverse mouse direction somewhere in system settings?

[Oleksiy-Yakovenko]

I can't install 24.04 unfortunately, but I'll keep an eye on it the first chance I get

[whtyger]

Ubuntu 25.10 is a bit different, it comes with KDE Plasma 6.4. They switched to the 6-th branch since 24.04, it has been completely rewritten on the base of Qt 6. 24.04 was the last version, which used 5-th branch of Plasma.
I tried DeaDBeeF of the same version on my notebook, with Kubuntu 20.04 on board, it has got the same issue with inverted control.
I checked my System Settings regarding mouse settings, and "Invert scroll direction" is unchecked. I should've noticed in other applications, if it was inverted. Moreover, the sound indicator in System Tray (the one with the speaker icon) which is used to adjust "Line out" volume also responds to mouse wheel and it behaves normally, i.e. increases volume on "wheel up" action and vice versa.

[whtyger]

Strange that system Volume Control and DeaDBeeF volume control behave differently. I expected that they should be more consistent.
I can rise a ticket in KDE bugtracker, but their efforts are focused on Plasma 6 now and they don't actively respond to Plasma 5 complaints.

[Oleksiy-Yakovenko]

Sorry for comment mess up.. I posted this, but was signed in on a wrong github account so I deleted it:

Either way it sounds like a bug or intended behavior in the previous version of Plasma, and it seems like they've already fixed it?

One thing you can try is to find another application which uses X11 tray icon which reacts to mouse scroll (which may be tricky, since most apps don't use this anymore). But if you can find such app - it could help to validate whether the issue is caused by Plasma, or by the app code.

[Oleksiy-Yakovenko]

Strange that system Volume Control and DeaDBeeF volume control behave differently.

It's not very strange, because volume control icon is not a classic system tray icon, and is using a completely different protocol under the hood.

[whtyger]

I conducted some investigations regarding X11 scrolling which is controlled by libinput currently. So called Natural Scrolling (content-relative vs scrollbars-relative) is disabled by default in current X11 systems. I enabled it as described here. After that DeaDBeeF volume control works as intended. Alas, all other scrollers has become inverted. I suppose, I could've achieve the same result by switching "Invert scroll direction" in System Settings.
I'll try to find some other app with X11 icon in tray which reacts to scrolling.