This week in Usability & Productivity, part 30

Usability & Productivity 1 Minute

Akademy is next week (I will be there!), but that didn’t stop us from plugging away on the Usability and Productivity initiative! Check it out:

New Features

Bugfixes

UI Polish & Improvement

Next week, your name could be in this list! Just check out https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved, and wind out how you can help be a part of something that really matters.

If my efforts to perform, guide, and document this work seem useful and you’d like to see more of them, then consider becoming a patron on Patreon, LiberaPay, or PayPal. Also consider making a donation to the KDE e.V. foundation.

Published by Nate

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33 thoughts on “This week in Usability & Productivity, part 30”

  2. The “Enter a different name” button should have the pencil icon used in Dolphin for the rename action. The X suggests that the action is merely canceled.

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    4. Don’t worry, it’s simple. This kind of small change is how I cut my teeth, and I can help you!

      First, download the KIO source code. See https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/development#Get_the_code

      Now figure out what you need to change. In this case, the easiest way to find the code in question is to click on the link to the change (https://cgit.kde.org/kio.git/commit/?id=54298c16f37a81afb670f7b1c8fae323aedfb8a3), and find the part of the code indicated there where the button is set up: . You should see cancelGuiItem.setText(i18nc("@action:button", "Enter a different name"));

      That’s the thing that overrides the text of the cancel button to say “Enter a different name”. We just need to override the icon as well. To do this, you could add a line below that saying cancelGuiItem.setIcon(QIcon::fromTheme(QStringLiteral("name-of-icon")));

      ..where “name-of-icon” is an appropriate icon. You can use the “Cuttlefish” app to find the names of icons. edit-rename looks like an appropriate icon. Once you’ve made and tested the patch, you can submit it using Phabricator. Here’s the documentation: https://community.kde.org/Infrastructure/Phabricator

      Liked by 2 people

    5. In the same amount of time you wrote that comment, you could have committed the change yourself.

      If there’s not a Github-like web editor, it’ll take me hours to learn the necessary git basics, then wait ages for the source code to check out, and then it’s probably also required to learn how pull requests in that Phabricator thing work. In the end a whole day is lost.

      So no, I’ll pass. I never entered “..” as file name anyway, so it’s not like I’ll scratch my own itch…

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    6. In the same amount of time you wrote that comment, you could have committed the change yourself.

      Yes, but I was hoping to teach a man to fish, ya know?

      Liked by 1 person

    7. No web editor with easy pull requests, no fishing.

      KDE SVN was the last offline SCM tool that didn’t suck. That’s the reason KDE’s localization teams use it to this day – because non-programmers can’t use git (it’s designed with a kind of UX in mind kernel hackers think is intuitive).

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    9. Not even a pencil IMO. A pencil would suggest that you’d be able to input the name after clicking that button. The button needs no icon, it’s merely a confirmation that the previous action failed.

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    3. Wayland is a protocol, and KDE Plasma already has Wayland support. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s usable. Give it a try!

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  4. Thanks again! 🙂
    This looks quite interesting: “Discover gained the ability to upgrade your computer’s firmware “. What does it mean? Like BIOS updates? GPU and CPU drivers update (I assume on Ubuntu systems only)?

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    2. Ah, is that this new initiative for unifying and improving drivers install on Linux systems that I heard some time ago? Cool! This is so much needed!

      As to gpu drivers, this won’t work on Manjaro since it’s using mhwd as a way to automate install and setup of gpu drivers. I’m no expert in that matter but I suspect that is because drivers on Arch side are not configured so fetching them directly would just make system unbootable. Some config changes in few places is necessary.
      However with time if this fwupd will pan out and will become a universal way of handling drivers, this can be a game changer for Linux and I’m sure that distribution will adjust to that.
      It’s great that you’re implementing this. I believe you are the pioneers on field of software stores and that also helps fwupd project to grow.

      Discover already tries to a lot so adding new things probably complicates your life (more things to break 😉 ), but on other hand, why not play with it and see where it leads? Anything simplifying stuff on user side (not always on yours) is a great thing for Linux ecosystem as a whole. We already have too much stuff for geeks, some friendly and powerful UI is rare and so much needed.

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    3. I completely agree, and thanks for the words of encouragement! mwhd is an excellent example of the problem we’re trying to solve, in fact. Distros should have to each write their own driver installer system. It’s a great example of the kind of thing that we can do in a centralized place in a way that supports everyone (ideally).

      I know it’s been a long road, but I see Discover ending up as one of the most-loved parts of the Plasma desktop.

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  5. I would like to to simply thank you.
    As a student I only use open-source software – I defently donate to a few projects and oss people like you from my first real salary.
    Good job.

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    1. Yes, I have collected many reports of this:

      Flaky/broken broken MTP support
      – https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=350384 – crash
      – https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=372860 – connect/disconnect loop
      – https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=379680 – -6PTP_ERROR_IO: failed to open session
      – https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=375840 – crash
      – https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=388402 – dolphin crash
      – https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319880 – connect/disconnect loop
      – https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=340173 – not seen as MTP device; device-specific

      Unfortunately I don’t have an Android phone so I can’t help out with it.

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