KDE Has Made Much Progress On Usability/Productivity, But They're Still Aiming For More

[ngraham]

144Hz
ngraham , if I had a wish for a small productivity/usability fix, it would be to "fix" the selection mode drop-down in the Okular toolbar. There is a down arrow, but I was never able to trigger it (right click or click on the arrow). I would just like to quickly change the selection mode (text, area, table) from this button

Thanks for the tip, this was annoying me too, but not enough to do something about it until you mentioned it. I've submitted three patches that should improve the situation:

https://phabricator.kde.org/D21621

https://phabricator.kde.org/D21622

https://phabricator.kde.org/D21624

[M@GOid]

There are so many people here complaining about Baloo, that I'm feeling a lucky dog for not even remembering about it until now.

Maybe there is a distro problem? (I use KDE Neon/Kubuntu)

Maybe is that I always clear my config files (on the /home partition) before a OS installation, since I prefer a clean install instead of doing a system upgrade?

[danielnez1]

There are so many people here complaining about Baloo, that I'm feeling a lucky dog for not even remembering about it until now.

Maybe there is a distro problem? (I use KDE Neon/Kubuntu)

Maybe is that I always clear my config files (on the /home partition) before a OS installation, since I prefer a clean install instead of doing a system upgrade?

...add one of them is the latest incarnation of everyone's favourite GNOME troll. Yey!

[mcloud]

There should never be two baloo_file processes. If there are (and really 'baloo_file', not 'baloo_file_extractor'), something is really borked.

If "disable" fixed it, then there likely was a database inconsistency. The lmdb library had an issue where it got confused with its internal freelist (memory pages replaced with new ones, available for reuse), this has been fixed in the recent lmdb release 0.9.23. Some distributions backported the fix or updated to 0.9.23 meanwhile, but e.g. Debian still uses an unfixed 0.9.22.

That might explain some issues then, Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS is on 0.9.21-1

[Baguy]

There are so many people here complaining about Baloo, that I'm feeling a lucky dog for not even remembering about it until now.

Maybe there is a distro problem? (I use KDE Neon/Kubuntu)

Maybe is that I always clear my config files (on the /home partition) before a OS installation, since I prefer a clean install instead of doing a system upgrade?

Me either. I've been using plasma for about a year as my only desktop (i used to hop between mate, xfce, and cinnamon)... Baloo has only crashed once on me about 2 months ago, and i think the bug that triggered it has since been fixed (i still have issues related to >= 1GB files taking ages to transfer or copy anywhere, but i don't know if that's baloo...).

However while baloo has been mostly trouble free for me, i have plenty of issues in other aspects of plasma, such as windows loosing focus on Wayland when using AMDGPU (RX GPU) .... (although this is probably due to them not having enough people to improve and fix the Wayland surface rendering) (Also on the Wayland note, there's a bunch of issues with the current clipboard support in it, but i hear they are working on rewriting it for 5.17), windows showing a thin-wire border after a while sometimes (Like Mate desktop's option to disable rendering of a window when moving it, you'll see thin little grey lines on the borders of windows), windows sometimes loose their rounded edges and shadows which leads to them becoming squared, and display settings being lost after reboots...

I really hope the next few plasma releases are oriented towards bug fixes now that the interface has mostly been taken care of.

[rtfazeberdee]

Now I hope they will have a look at the window resize problems, because this is a usability nightmare.

I don't seem to have any problems resizing at all. I'm on opensuse TW and plasma 5.15.5

[Danny3]

I don't seem to have any problems resizing at all. I'm on opensuse TW and plasma 5.15.5

Good for you!
I'm using Kubuntu 19.04 with KDE Plasma 5.16 beta and until I find the right pixel both on the vertical elges (left and right) and bottom (right) corner, I don't see the resize handle so I cannot click-hold and drag to start resizing.
Coming from Windows 7, this seems to take a lot of time.
I used Cinnamon before and I don't remember seeing this problem or it was not that bad, but here, it really makes me lose time.

[rtfazeberdee]

Good for you!
I'm using Kubuntu 19.04 with KDE Plasma 5.16 beta and until I find the right pixel both on the vertical elges (left and right) and bottom (right) corner, I don't see the resize handle so I cannot click-hold and drag to start resizing.

I do not get any resizing handles when the window has been maximised by clicking the maximise button, I don't know if thats a bug or thats the way its supposed to work.

[Awesomeness]

My sole beef with Baloo is that when there is a bug with a specific file, Baloo doesn't say which one. It just runs in circles, crashes, or whatever. Old Nepomuk had a GUI that spelled out which file was being indexed right now. So when there was a bug, I would have had the chance to delete it, check if it's corrupt, and possibly send the file to KDE.

Bugs can always happen. That's how software works. But if I can't properly investigate the bug, writing bug reports is pointless.

That said, the last time I've hit a Baloo bug was like two or three years ago.

[M@yeulC]

Thanks for the tip, this was annoying me too, but not enough to do something about it until you mentioned it. I've submitted three patches that should improve the situation:

https://phabricator.kde.org/D21621

https://phabricator.kde.org/D21622

https://phabricator.kde.org/D21624

Wow, thanks a lot! This seriously made my day!

I never figured press-and-hold was a thing, yet I've used KDE on a daily basis for more than 7 years... THanks for the tip (though press-and-hold also unnecessarily slows things down, so I agree that making use of the arrow as a drop-down is a better option.

Regarding D21622, it is true that the arrow area is small. Perhaps the context menu could additionally be augmented with the various actions on such buttons? (context would be triggered by a long press on touchscreens, but right click with a mouse).

Thank you again!