KDE Plasma Wayland Now Supports High Resolution Scrolling

[schmidtbag]

Unless it's not what I'm thinking it is, I thought KDE + Wayland already supported high resolution scrolling? Seems to be working for me already and I didn't install this update yet.

[skeevy420]

That is good. It isn't entirely clear from the blog post that that won't change in the future though:



(emphasis is mine)

The way I read it, the plan is to change that (possibly after reworking the menu structure), or at least it is not yet decided upon.

I would love to be proven wrong here.

Here's the actual quote:

Kate and KWrite have now adopted KHamburgerMenu! Because these are large and complex apps, the main menubar is still shown by default. And for the time being, the hamburger menu shows the entire traditional menu structure within it, rather than trying to offer a curated set of actions. This can be done in the future!

Now, if you read the entire paragraph, it sounds like dumping the old Menubar into the Hamburger was the easiest solution to get it the feature prototyped and added to the apps and that sometime in the future the Hamburger could use a better/smarter approach where, for made up examples, it might only show options not in use elsewhere, might be redesigned so the layout feels more natural in a vertical environment, or any number of changes.

Whatever the case, as long as the old ways remain I'll be happy. That's why I'm a Plasma user after all of these years.

I'm really not a fan of Icon Only, Hamburger Menus, etc. I'm not a fan of the trend to try to make everything sleek and sexy because all it does is hides functionality behind more clicks and taps or just removes the functionality altogether which can lead to the GNOME Conundrum where you're both Minimalist in Feature and Functionality while simultaneously being a Bloated Resource Hog.

[Chugworth]

Unless it's not what I'm thinking it is, I thought KDE + Wayland already supported high resolution scrolling? Seems to be working for me already and I didn't install this update yet.

You must be thinking of the wrong thing then, because it's not here yet in Plasma Wayland. It has been supported on most touchpads for a long time, but not mouse scrollwheels. Also too, don't be fooled by the "smooth scrolling" setting in Firefox. In fact, that should be turned off. It gives you a false sense of smooth scrolling, not legitimate pixel precision.

[Vistaus]

The screenshot of the hamburger menu on that blog looks awful. It just hides the traditional menu bar behind one extra click. Why?!?

I assume it is to save screen space but the menu bar doesn't take that much space on a desktop or laptop monitor (unlike a phone for example).

And (as the blog says) kate/kwrite are non-trivial programs. In my opinion, it doesn't make sense to do this change for those programs specifically. I know Gnome has gone down the dumbing down route already, but that is one of the reasons I switched to KDE. This is exactly the type of thing I don't want.

At least with kwrite/Kate specifically I won't be personally affected, I use VS Code instead. But I would prefer if the competition stayed competitive. Competition leads to higher pressure to innovate for all parties, leading to better products across the board. (yes this is true in FOSS too, just hopefully less vicious and more borrowing from each other).

Yeah, hiding the menu bar on non-phone screens is not a good idea. I hate that. And even if you do it, at least adapt it right instead of a long list with hover menus, like in GNOME or Firefox (I can't believe I'm actually crediting GNOME for a change lol). But better to the show menu bar on bigger screens by default. Can't KDE poke the display manager or whatever to figure out what the screen resolution is? If small --> hamburger menu, if big --> menu bar.

[Vistaus]

+1
KDE is all about choice. Dolphin uses KHamburgerMenu since long, but a simple ctrl+M allow switching between it and good old menu bar. For the task manager, icon-only is now the default on new installs, but old ones kept icon+text (and, personally, I kept icon+test on my older main system while my newer laptops all have icon-only).

Except that Dolphin keeps hiding it every now and then, so you have to press CTRL+M again. Noticed this for months on several distros with clean settings, so it must be default behavior to hide it every now and then. Really annoying, esp. because Dolphin is a near-perfect file manager otherwise.

[Vistaus]

That's why this year will be the year of the Linux Desktop.

I don't even understand why that welcome screen exists in the first place. If I open a file, I open it specifically from Dolphin or Yakuake. And if I want to start a blank file, I don't want to be bothered, i.e. I want to start typing right away. That welcome screen makes no sense to me. (Luckily I'm not using Kate or KWrite, but FeatherPad.)

[Chugworth]

Yeah, hiding the menu bar on non-phone screens is not a good idea. I hate that. And even if you do it, at least adapt it right instead of a long list with hover menus, like in GNOME or Firefox (I can't believe I'm actually crediting GNOME for a change lol). But better to the show menu bar on bigger screens by default. Can't KDE poke the display manager or whatever to figure out what the screen resolution is? If small --> hamburger menu, if big --> menu bar.

Well in Dolphin you can place action buttons in the toolbar for pretty much anything you would usually access through the menu bar. For me, I add the Up button, the Refresh button, and the New Tab button. There's not much else that I frequently require, and then the menu bar can be turned off to save space and reduce clutter.

[schmidtbag]

You must be thinking of the wrong thing then, because it's not here yet in Plasma Wayland. It has been supported on most touchpads for a long time, but not mouse scrollwheels. Also too, don't be fooled by the "smooth scrolling" setting in Firefox. In fact, that should be turned off. It gives you a false sense of smooth scrolling, not legitimate pixel precision.

Not sure if it makes a difference, but I haven't used KDE with a mouse scroll wheel in years. My main KDE setup is a laptop, and the most minute 2-finger scroll barely moves the page, as I would expect with smooth scrolling.
So, if this change is only for mouse wheels then I guess we can disregard my comment.

[Draget]

I recently started liking LIM, a concept from Unity 'Locally Integrated Menus'. The Menu-Bar is part of the Window Titlebar.
In KDE you can get the hamburger-menu into the title bar or there are some third-party plugins/theme files that hack it to enable LIM in KDE.

I wish this was a native feature. I like the increase workspace, works already well for FireFox.

And concerning the 'Window title' discussion: KDE could integrate it by moving the window-title off to the right the wider the menu gets, until it would just hide it if the menu gets too close and might be confused with the window title. Would love such an implementation.

[blackiwid]

And (as the blog says) kate/kwrite are non-trivial programs. In my opinion, it doesn't make sense to do this change for those programs specifically. I know Gnome has gone down the dumbing down route already, but that is one of the reasons I switched to KDE. This is exactly the type of thing I don't want.

Hiding mouse menu's is not by definition dumbing something down, I would even claim it at least can be the opposite, sure if you have no keyboard shortcuts or only bad ones and then hide things behind more submenus of the mouse it might be giving up functionality for looks or more space for content. But if you have good keyboard shortcuts or even let's say something like Unities HUD where you can search the menu points you forgot the keyboard shortcut or you use so seldom that you don't care to learn it, it can be whatever the opposite is to dumbing down.

The first thing in Emacs I and probably >90% of users do especially non-casual users is deactivate (menu-bar-mode -1) and (tool-bar-mode -1). Pushing people to become mouse pushers is dumbing things down. And I get that there is a lazy time before you had a coffee or other times where you want to use a browser window or something with mouse and or with only 1 hand, but when using a text editor is surely not the time when you have no hands on the keyboard.