KDE Developers Polish The Desktop Ahead Of Next Month's Plasma 5.22

[extremesquared]

No. any bug related to activities should be in last priority.

Are activities really a polarizing feature? I ignored them for years until I started using them while doing work. They shine when used as slightly-evolved virtual desktops to segregate tasks / workflows more explicitly.

[aufkrawall]

What are the strange behaviors and inconsistencies? I use Alt+Tab 5000 times a day and it's working pretty well for my use cases at least.

Sometimes the application thumbnail list (the one with an x that allows to close them) isn't fully rendered on top of fullscreen windows with compositing suspended, then only the frame of the switcher is visible. Sadly, this happens rather erratically. The same probably applies to broken blur effect of krunner after compositing was suspended.

[Lanz]

They really need to rework Kickoff (the start menu) yet again. You open it up and naturally your mouse goes up to one of the categories, causing you to have to bring it back down and hover over favourites again to see them.

[tornado99]

It's actually pretty similat to on OS X. Compare:

macOS:
1. Click your own name in the menubar
2. Click the name of the user you want to switch to
[you are taken to a big login prompt thingy]
3. Enter password for that user
4. Hit enter key or click button

Plasma
1. Hit Meta Key or click Kickoff icon to open it
2. Click "Switch User"
[you are taken to SDDM, the login manager]
3. Click on user you want to switch to
4. Enter password for that user
5. Hit enter key or click button

So there is one extra step, and the flow is a bit different. I agree that this could be streamlined a bit, but we're talking about a matter of seconds. I'm not sure this qualifies as a huge deal.

Still, probably not that hard to change so that you select which user you want to switch to a bit earlier.

Isn't the problem here that SDDM is not integrated into KDE and just does its own thing? On macOS I can see which other users are on the computer, and which are logged in from a drop down menu on the top bar. KDE Plasma has no idea about the status of other user accounts . Perhaps Plasma needs a more integrated DDM.

[ngraham]

Not really. We can query users from outside SDDM and present a list of which user to switch to so what when you get to SDDM, it's showing you that user such that entering the user's password will take you right there. It's just a matter of doing it. I have filed a bug report to track the request: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=436821

[Vistaus]

They really need to rework Kickoff (the start menu) yet again. You open it up and naturally your mouse goes up to one of the categories, causing you to have to bring it back down and hover over favourites again to see them.

Bug report or it didn't happen. #FollowTheUnofficialPhoronixRules

[ngraham]

They really need to rework Kickoff (the start menu) yet again. You open it up and naturally your mouse goes up to one of the categories, causing you to have to bring it back down and hover over favourites again to see them.

We fixed that last week. I mentioned it in https://pointieststick.com/2021/04/3...-so-much-more/.

[extremesquared]

We fixed that last week. I mentioned it in https://pointieststick.com/2021/04/3...-so-much-more/.

The power of the screenshot utility is such an under-appreciated part of kde. I use it pretty much daily for work. Drag and drop from spectacle works in slack and most in-browser apps I use (jira especially). It's pretty common that a cropped still is exactly the amount of screen sharing necessary for collaborative work.

[bug77]

...
So there is one extra step, and the flow is a bit different. I agree that this could be streamlined a bit, but we're talking about a matter of seconds. I'm not sure this qualifies as a huge deal.
...

I think that mentality is what keeps KDE from being a truly great DE.
As far UIs are concerned, responsiveness is determined by a few milliseconds, immersion can be broken by being a single pixel off. "it's just a few seconds, no biggie" is not what I want to hear from my favorite DE developer.
And I do understand how hard it is to make a proper DE for free. Hell, even Microsoft with all their billions will do a Windows 8 sometimes. But I do believe having the right mindset is paramount.

[extremesquared]

... As far UIs are concerned, responsiveness is determined by a few milliseconds, immersion can be broken by being a single pixel off. "it's just a few seconds, no biggie" is not what I want to hear from my favorite DE developer...

This feels like an over-simplification of the chaos that is UI design.
Gnome took the position that saving some people milliseconds in the UI was good even if it sent others into an hours-long dive into dconf/gconf on stackoverflow to accomplish some DE tasks.
With KDE, there is a potentially overwhelming and ugly wall of in-UI configurability.

Interestingly, when extended to the extreme, both of these dogmas come to the same endpoint:
Infinite simplicity / streamlining would be a UI that does nothing, where everyone becomes a programmer/bash power user by necessity.
Infinite complexity / flexibility of the UI results in practically the same outcome, just with a mouse involved.