Hidden sidebar: how can I disable popping up icons?

I set my Unity sidebar to hidden. Great!

However, I am still seeing icons popping out which terribly annoys me.

How can I disable this behaviour?

Solution 1:

The described behavior is done by design and so, the default and expected behavior. There is a possibility to avoid the popping up of those icons using the unity-tweak-tool. You can install the tool by executing sudo apt install unity-tweak-tool. Open Unity Tweak Tool from the dash and switch the Icons settings of Urgent animation and Launch animation to No animation.

Now the little caveat : I have tested it and mostly it works as expected, but sometimes it didn't ... (because as mentioned before, it is not the default behavior being intended by the design team). But that might be due to the fact that I switched the settings too often during the testing phase. When you just keep the changed settings and restart the session, it also might work persistently.