This week in KDE: polishing the System Tray and more | Hacker News Reader

This week in KDE: polishing the System Tray and more

pointieststick.com

58 pointsjrepinc27 comments

I've used Kubuntu as a normal every day desktop for some time and there are two simple annoyances that popup in my mind:

- when I get a notification in the systray that there is an update I click on it but nothing happens. Then I have to click on the Update Manager which also presents itself in the systray as having an update to start the actual update process. Why can't the program giving the notification be started directly from the notification popup window?

- the restart/shutdown dialog is infuriating!. When I click on restart or shutdown I get presented with a full screen overlay in which I have to click again on restart or shutdown. Ok: I understand the need for a confirmation. But the click area is very sensitive and I you accidentally just outside of the icon area you will be dropped back to the desktop. ARGH! Why do UI designers always think that everyone has some sort of FPS aiming capability with the mouse and can repeatedly click with pixel accuracy?

I agree the UI for the second point is annoying. There's a workaround though: The option you wanted is preselected. You can press enter and get the action you wanted without a mouse.

* Your first issue is resolved lately.

* I get your frustration. I personally just open up krunner and type 'reboot' or 'sleep' and press enter.

In my personal experience, I've found KDE to be technically more interesting than Gnome, but Gnome to be better designed in terms of user experience.

I wish Gnome could match the power/performance of KDE, or KDE could match the user friendliness and visual consistency of Gnome...

Polishing is something the KDE taskbar desperately needs. Glad to see it happen.

That mouse pointer in particular. It is hideous and distracting.

You can change the mouse pointer in KDE.

Defaults matter.

Just wanted to point out that this kind of response puts off many would-be users of any software.

I honestly don't see how the default mouse pointer in KDE is hideous or distracting.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Kubuntu_...

https://kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.12/kdeconnect.png

Never seen it before so tbh it looks kinda .... Obese?

How is the progress of subsurfaces clipping bug in the Wayland session? It takes a really long time.

Is there any public info on the progress?

Do you mean https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-54888? That's a Qt bug, not in KDE software.

No, I mean this one: https://phabricator.kde.org/T10530

Did they already add "turn off all animations and needless movements, fades and transparencies" option? I guess not, and I'd really appreciate it. KDE would became useful for me again. Seriously, I've booted live USB on thinkpad x240 and there was some current KDE running. For a few minutes I thought there was something very wrong with laptop, but it was KDE making feel core-i7 like lowend celeron. It makes me wonder if authors use that environment on very high-end machines exclusively. Also "start menu", sorry for the naming, feels like unstoppable carousel to me (those sliding tabs). All this is a pity because I really do like QT for development, but unstoppable animations are no-go

>Did they already add "turn off all animations and needless movements, fades and transparencies" option?

Yes, ~10 years ago.

This highlights the difference between defaults and options.

Options that would solve a users problems often go unused leaving the user with a negative opinion.

Maybe as part of first run it ought to set a default useful based on current performance.

It might also be worthwhile to think about how it degrades under pressure. Is it possible to notice frames dropped or delayed and degrade more gracefully.

I think there are some blacklisted video cards. I assume is is not as easy as you think to write the code that detects the perfect thresholds where animations are smooth all the time. I would like to assume that most KDE users are competent enough to at least google the answer on how to turn the animations off and desktop effects too (I mean somehow they installed a KDE distro finding a checkbox should be much easier).

In theory but never overestimate human competence or underestimate the value of good defaults.

There will always be some people that will disagree with the defaults. plus metrics/telemetry is disliked by many users and is not built into the software. Knowing what settings are changed often could help, though it depends on project, I see many GNOME users changing defaults with adding a system tray extensions and nobody cares.

> Maybe as part of first run it ought to set a default useful based on current performance.

Given how NVIDIA drivers are installed, the first run may not be representative. First run for each new xorg config maybe. But that could lead to random changes in behaviour as well on updates.

Maybe login would be better. The setting could be x y or z or "set automatically based on performance" with the last being the default

Please, how? i've spent a few days trying to stop those with no luck. I can turn off only some of them and even that gets ignored by some applications :( (like "start menu", or settings manager itself)

Yeah I think you’ve been able to do it for a while by turning off the compositor?

You don't need to disable the compositor. You can set its speed to "instant" and it won't do any animation.

> All this is a pity because I really do like QT for development, but unstoppable animations are no-go

The animations aren’t because of QT, but KDE itself

> I've booted live USB on thinkpad x240

I think I found what was causing your performance problems. I'm running KDE Plasma 5.16.5 / Ubuntu 19.10 on an old 3rd gen core-i5 (i5-2520M) and it's crazy fast. It's performance has been on par with light DE's I've tested like Budgie, beats Gnome3 and just crushes Windows on this laptop. I even turned compositing on just for the extra effects (I like my wobbly windows) and it still outperforms Gnome 3 and Windows.

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