This week in KDE: new KWin compositing, new Kickoff, new recording level visualization!

98 thoughts on “This week in KDE: new KWin compositing, new Kickoff, new recording level visualization!”

1. The first sentence of your post made my day. Week. Month. My year ! YEAH !

   LikeLiked by 1 person

   Reply

2. Looking great! Thanks to everyone in the KDE team, I’m super interested to see how the new KWin compositing turns out. One thing though, I hope there is an option to turn the split view animation off, as personally I’d prefer it to be fast than look pretty, however other users might disagree.

   LikeLike

   Reply

   1. I agree with you, some animation I left but a lot of them I disabled, for example the right click context menu animation. It’s a time saver for me

      LikeLike

   2. May I ask how? I’d like to specifically disable context menu animation (like you did) and global menu animation.

      LikeLike

   3. Hi, sorry for the late reply.
      in Settings > behavior of workspace> desktop effects
      in the aspect section there will be a voice : pop-up windows that dissolve, something like that.

      my settings are in italian it’s quite hard to me to be precise.

      LikeLike

   4. That worked. Grazie!

      LikeLike

3. Wow! KDE plasma It’s pushing very hard!!!! Big thanks to the KDE team for the hard work!!!

   LikeLike

   Reply

   1. You’re very welcome!

      LikeLike

4. love love love the kwin compositor enhancements! this means that I can finally drop using kwin-lowlatency side-project and now everyone will have these goodies!

   Still, how does it compare with kwin-ft in the wayland side?

   LikeLike

   Reply

   1. https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/merge_requests/502

      Kwin-lowlatency still has the benefit of unredirect support… This patch fixes that problem, but only for xorg… and it doesn’t look like it will make it into 5.21

      LikeLike

   2. Only Wayland* sorry

      LikeLike

   3. For Direct Scanout on XWayland see: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1124

      LikeLike

5. Keep up the good work!

   LikeLike

   Reply

6. I’ll be honest: I’m *really* happy about the KWin latency improvement, but I don’t like the option to choose for snappiness or smoothness. No other compositor out there has such an option and I think there shouldn’t be any. A compositor should work out of the box without tweaking, it’s such a basic piece of software in a system with a GUI. Ideally, it should provide both snappiness and smoothness without compromises, otherwise devs should find the sweet spot between them and ship it. Leaving the option to choose feels like the compositor is somehow not perfect and you gotta tweak it like an old car.

   LikeLiked by 1 person

   Reply

   1. But this is the beauty of KDE. Your use case is not the everybody user case. Let me explain. Tweaking compositor to disable smoothness or effects is a perfect fit for people using KDE thru spice remote connections. In this case we want few or none effects affecting bandwidth or client performance.

      LikeLike

   2. I was a bit confused what the difference was. At a guess it sounds like the difference between having vsync enabled & disabled. A brief tech explanation beside the setting might be good. The remote connection thing sounds like the sort of setting the client software should enable when connecting in, i.e. like in VNC viewer selecting the bitrate/quality.

      LikeLike

   3. It’s like many of the options in KDE. The default should be good enough for most, but you get the ability to tune it. Something you don’t get on other desktops without hacking around or messing with config files…

      LikeLike

   4. Yup! I think that is what many Plasma users love. Works by default but you can make it work to your tastes.

      LikeLike

7. Ehhh … I wish Dolphin and Krunner would learn to search for files.

   Let me remind you that search with Baloo is not able to quickly respond to file changes and correctly search through hidden files. Until it indexes, you shouldn’t wait for the desired file in the search results. This can happen in 100 milliseconds, or in hundreds of millennia.

   If Baloo is disabled, then Dolphin’s built-in search is unable to find hidden files. Because of what, the search results lose all credibility.

   LikeLike

   Reply

   1. For dolphin, if you wanna filter on a folder you can press Ctrl + I 🙂

      LikeLike

   2. “If Baloo is disabled, then Dolphin’s built-in search is unable to find hidden files.”

      Ah. Looks like I won’t be replacing Nemo as a main file manager any time soon, then.

      LikeLike

   3. They already can search for files, using Baloo. If Baloo isn’t working for you, please file bug reports. Disabling it removes the search functionality. 🙂 Can’t disable the search functionality and also still have the search functionality. 🙂

      LikeLike

   4. The obvious counter is that doing that works on Windows — if you disable search indexing, Explorer still works perfectly well to find files by name. Dolphin’s the odd one out if it has an “all or nothing” approach.

      LikeLike

8. “In addition, it brings support for mixed-refresh-rate display setups on Wayland, e.g. one 144Hz screen and one 60Hz screen! ”

   Does it already support freesync?

   LikeLike

   Reply

   1. no

      LikeLike

9. At a first glance, one thing I don’t like about the new Kickoff is the lesser intuivity for new users. For example, the original Kickoff would not only say “Kate” but “Text editor” and not only “LibreOffice Writer” but “word processor”. I think this is especially important given some of the strange program names.

   LikeLike

   Reply

   1. There are actually 2 different ways that the new kickoff uses to display apps. The favorites section uses a grid with only app names. When you browse for apps by category or with search, a vertical list is used instead. In the vertical list view, app names are on the left and descriptions of the apps are on the right

      LikeLike

   2. Is it possible to turn the grid view off? Not using a touchscreen like 99% of users, grid displays aren’t a good use of space.

      LikeLike

   3. Grids are more information-dense than lists are, not the opposite. The old Kickoff could only display about 8 favorites in its favorites view without the view becoming scrollable; the new Kickoff can display 16.

      LikeLiked by 1 person

   4. Depends on the information — a grid will allow optimal display of more-or-less regularly sized items of content that are the size of the grid cells. If that’s icons with equal width and height only, a grid is perfect. If it’s icons plus application names (and/or plus a description) it generally isn’t. If you’re truncating text to fit “GNU Image Manipulation Program”, or forcing the grid tile it’s in to be distended, or insisting on abbreviated names, that’s moved away from being a menu, which is inherently a list and the icon is secondary. Most application menus (desktop paradigm) are menus, most mobile interfaces — and PC ‘desktops’ because of the intended purpose of a pinboard for shortcuts, rather than storing files/folder — are grids and ignore truncation.

      None of this is particularly new, only new to each generation of developers.

      LikeLike

   5. OK, good thanks. As long as that has been considered.

      LikeLike

10. Great work! I’m very happy using KDE since more than 10 years!

    But I’m here to ask if is there any chance to get this issue resolved.

    KDE Lockscreen and NVidia Updates from kde

    Some time ago I reported on KDE Bugs and I remember read the issue was being corrected by Nvidia, but I can’t find now in the tracker list.

    Today I upgraded nvidia driver from 455 to 460 version, and got this same error on system reboot.

    I know that has low level of priority in all TODO things list, but to get a smooth overall experience, would be great to find it solved in future versions of KDE.

    Thank you again for the great work!

    LikeLike

    Reply

    1. You’re very welcome!

       In general, when an Nvidia driver upgrade breaks things, 99% of the time it’s Nvidia’s fault rather than our fault. As such, bugs need to be reported to Nvidia, either by sending an email to linux-bugs@nvidia.com or making a post at https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/c/gpu-unix-graphics/linux/ It’s also helpful to the Nvidia developers if you could run nvidia-bug-report.sh and attach the resulting file in your report.

       LikeLike

    2. I’m sure it’s due to Nvidia not having a stable system API, so if you update the user space part of the driver, and have not rebooted in order to use the new kernel driver, that breaks anything you launch after the upgrade which tries to use hardware rendering. But it would still be good if the shutdown screen has a fallback so you can reboot even if OpenGL is broken. Though I suppose that assumes it is possible for it to handle the failure, rather than it just crashing in the driver.

       LikeLiked by 1 person

    3. As of frameworks 5.78, we have such a fallback to software rendering if openGL is broken. See https://invent.kde.org/frameworks/kdeclarative/commit/090610124d4650150af49a8e30f6b77ad9803dfe

       LikeLike

    4. Nice, so I’ll get that next version

       LikeLike

11. Wow, so many awesome things this week too! The new Kickoff-menu looks great, those volume visualizers are excellent and I love the polish that animation effect when splitting views in Dolphin brings!

    LikeLike

    Reply

    1. I didn’t notice what the animation was showing at first, I had to play it twice to try & see what was happening. The middle-blue on grey is a bit difficult to see to my eyes. Try watching the clip without looking within 1″ of the bar itself, it isn’t notice-able. Nice idea though.

       LikeLike

    2. Yes, we know that the current visualization isn’t the best and are open to improving the UI.

       LikeLike

12. That was awesome! Thanks to all KDE devs for these great improvements.

    The fact that there will be a legacy kickoff in store, shows that KDE devs are thinking about anything possible, and they’re respecting users!

    LikeLiked by 1 person

    Reply

13. Sorry for offtopic. I already know that you’re using openSUSE Tumbleweed, but I’d also be interested to know what IDE/tools do you use for Plasma development. Is it KDevelop, QtCreator or VSCode? Or maybe Vim? Clang-tidy or Clazy?

    LikeLike

    Reply

    1. In terms of apps, just Kate and Konsole. That’s it! I find that IDEs generally increase the amount of overhead for me more than they provide in the form of extra features and better integration.

       for CLI tools, I use KDE’s kdesrc-build tool, git (obviously), gcc, gdb, and grep. So much grep. All the grep.

       LikeLiked by 1 person

    2. Thanks!

       LikeLike

    3. It must be too much to ask for, but would be interested in doing a development video to help newbies like me to understand how KDE apps are being developed? Like, it’s really difficult for me to understand how a big project like DEs are developed and tested during development.

       I’m a web developer, and the habit of seeing things change real-time often scares me from writing code and then compile it to view results.

       Maybe give this thought a consideration?

       LikeLike

    4. It’s a lot simpler than you may think: most of us devs live on git master, rebuilding everything every day or every few days, or using a distro that provides git master packages, like KDE Neon Developer or openSUSE Tumbleweed with the KDE:Unstable repos.

       More videos aren’t a bad idea, but they’re a lot more time-consuming to create than written documentation and we have a limited number of people with video creation and editing skills. Contributions are welcome. 🙂

       LikeLiked by 1 person

    5. Use rg (ripgrep) instead of grep. It’s better.

       LikeLike

    6. Personally, I use mostly vim with some LSP plugins, grep -re to navigate the code and gdb.

       LikeLike

14. Hey Nate!

    Fantastic update, this is exciting stuff!

    One little thing which stood out to me is the discount of the buttons at the bottom of the new Kickoff menu. It seems like they are kind-of grouped by function, but then the spacing between different “groups” isn’t consistent. What’s the rationale here?

    LikeLike

    Reply

    1. The bottom buttons don’t have different spacing. It could be that the icons themselves have slightly different side margins causing 1 or 2 px difference in effective spacing.

       LikeLike

    2. Sorry, I’m not sure if I’m referring to the right thing now as the spacing of the icon is visibly different, here’s the bit I’m referring to, note the blue & pink lines measuring between icon centres.
       
       But maybe it makes more sense in motion. 🙂

       LikeLike

    3. Right, the buttons have different widths because their text labels are have different lengths. The widths aren’t all normalized.

       LikeLike

    4. But why the giant space after “places” then?

       LikeLike

    5. Because each tab’s content (icon + text) is left aligned.

       Obviously all of this can easily be tweaked.

       LikeLike

    6. It looks like the two on the left are meant to be a pair & the 5 on the right their own group, but the spacing of the 5 isn’t even. Perhaps these left/right groups could be defined by different shade of gray? The legacy kicker’s icons were nice & evenly spaced, having all the options of what were in the legacy ‘Leave’ section spread across the lower right seems odd but i guess there’s a reason for it – maybe it makes more sense in use; perhaps the Leave button has been pressed & the sleep/hibernate/restart/shutdown ones have extended out?

       LikeLike

15. I have a question about the new compositor:
    If you play a full screen game, you’d normally disable the compositor to gain performance, right?

    Now, if you have two monitors plugged in and on one screen your full screen application game runs: Can you disable compositing for the this screen only? Or would multi-gpu output help here? Would you have a compositor per output?

    Last but not least, if compositing becomes disabled for the full screen game, the new compositing pipeline does not enhance the gaming experience here, or does it?

    Could you please forward these questions to Vlad? I’d be very interested. Thank you! 🙂

    LikeLike

    Reply

    1. These questions are easy to answer as there’s not much very specific to kwin, but the answer varies between X.org and Wayland sessions:
       1. On the X.org session, aside from latency improvements, nothing else should change for you. There is no per screen rendering on X because of the limitations of X itself (X doesn’t have a real sense of multi-monitors, but instead map a portion of a single X screen to a monitor. Thus the compositor needs to sync the vblanking interval of one monitor. This means on setups with mixed refresh rates you often get everything vsynced to the slowest. ie. with 144hz + 60hz, everything still runs at 60fps unless you manually override which to sync with (you can do this with an environment variable in nvidia, and I find this automatically happens with tearfree enabled on AMDGPU). Now, when the compositor is toggled off like when you’re gaming, all the monitors are “toggled off” as the compositor can only draw the entire X screen.

       Now the feature you’re thinking of, which would allow the X compositor to keep working while allowing games to bypass it is called “fullscreen unredirection”. This would allow your game to avoid compositing, but not everything else. Compositing in X is an “extension” and isn’t required as you know. X can draw directly in software without a GPU involved to render everything, as it does when you toggle off. When you introduce a compositor, all the windows are drawn to an offscreen buffer, and then “redirected” to the compositor to do it’s, well, compositing, which then is actually drawn on the screen. Unredirection works by allowing windows that take up an entire display to not do this, and instead just draw the “old fashion” way as if there were no compositor at all. This was removed from kwin long ago and in my opinion was short sighted simply for the reason you describe — you lose compositing on other screens while gaming. Of course, the compositor still running does maintain it’s opengl context and does use some of the GPU, so toggling off will always in theory allow you to gain a little more performance in your game, but at the downside of everything on other monitors losing compositing.

       2. On Wayland, things are different. The compositor *is* the display server, and so there is no such thing as toggling off like we do in X. Now this gives us more flexibility when it comes to multiple displays as we can render everything individually to each actual monitor, and sync everything to the vblank interval of that display. So your 144hz + 60hz setup won’t result in the problem of everything rendering at 60fps like on the X session. (This wasn’t possible before this patch though as kwin didn’t have the ability to render each screen individually in wayland until now, which is why this is so exciting in addition to the latency improvements!). You will likely run into issues still on wayland with gaming though since everything is forced to be compositing and on wayland “ever frame is perfect” (it’s vsync’d, drawn to a back buffer and then displayed when ready, but this ofc introduces lag). There is a merge request to address this as well for kwin called “direct scanout”, which would allow games to draw directly to the display buffer. It’s MR !502 by Xaver Hugl. It’d be somewhat akin to unredirection on X, for wayland. Sadly it isn’t finished and likely won’t be in 5.21, but hopefully in 5.22. It will be another notable feature imo when ready. 🙂

       3. The improvements in latency allows for everything to be snappier while compositing at the risk of potentially dropping frames (the frame might not get rendered in time before the vblank), as the goal is to have the frame rendered as close as possible to the vblank so that it’s done “just in time” but not too early that we have to wait a long time before we can display it in sync with the vblank, and not too late thus we drop it and display the last frame again (resulting in what you perceive as stutter). This is why there is a setting where you can toggle this. If you find things are stuttering, which means the frame is taking too long to render before the vblank, you can tune for higher latency and less stutter. Meanwhile if you’re okay with the odd late frame but want the lowest latency as possible, even though it would result in stutter, you can tune it to do that as well. As such, if you have the compositor turned off for a game, this change will basically not change anything in the way of performance as you’re not even using compositing 🙂

       LikeLiked by 1 person

    2. Thank you for this comprehensive answer!! 🙂 To conclude, I’d have two more questions:

       1) How does this all apply to XWalyand clients/games in a Wayland session? How do they fit into the puzzle?

       2) What’s left before VRR capabilities can be implemented (under Wayland)?

       And if we have direct scan out and VRR, could we claim KWin to be 100% gaming ready or is something else still missing?

       LikeLike

    3. Is it ever 100%? There is still no HDR, though that requires changes to more than just Kwin.

       LikeLike

    4. Right, I could also add “Virtual Reality Headsets” to the list. But all that should be the state of the art now, shouldn’t it? 🙂

       LikeLike

    5. KWin needs hardware Raytracing support, and maybe DLSS…

       LikeLike

    6. VRR is still left to do, you won’t see this in 5.21, but it’s planned :). As for Xwayland, funny you mention this, as Xaver literally just made a bug report for it here so direct scanout can work: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/issues/1124

       Whether those two issues are then what you consider “ready for gaming” I don’t know. I personally would start using it for gaming after !502 is merged and related bugs are addressed, but that’s just me. I don’t use VRR now anyway due to my multimonitor setup on X, so not like I’d be losing anything by switching at that point, but ofc it would be nice.

       I play osu! as well so getting my drawing tablet working with libinput/libwacom would also be nice. Right now I interact with it via xinput.

       The other thing is the security model of wayland kind of makes the ability for applications to set “keybinds” (such as discord) impossible, since if a Window isn’t focused, it won’t receive input. Now this actually works provided both discord is running through Xwayland, along with any game you’re playing is in Xwayland, but as soon as you focus an actual wayland client, Xwayland will ofc, stop receiving input, and thus your keybinds won’t work.

       It personally think it would be nice to have an ability to whitelist applications (even if you couldn’t whitelist xwayland applications specifically due to the obvious security risks) to work around this, then if you could run discord as a wayland client since this should soon be possible with Chromium’s new Wayland backend in Ozone, you could still use the keybinds, but who knows I guess.

       Anyway, there’s always improvements that could be made, others have already commented things they’d like to see too. But 5.21 isn’t the only release from KDE this year and I’d almost be willing to bet that 2021 overall will be the “Year of the Wayland Desktop” for Linux as a whole.

       LikeLiked by 1 person

    7. Thanks for your answer again! Looking forward to find an issue about “VRR” so it becomes easier to track its state. 🙂

       LikeLike

    8. Your astonishing level of knowledge leaves me with the conclusion that you should be submitting KWin merge requests!

       LikeLike

    9. I am not a good programmer but I try to follow along haha.

       LikeLike

    10. Seems to me you have everything you need to get started. 🙂

        LikeLike

    11. And you should start writing your own blog posts about kwin development!!! =)

        LikeLike

16. I loved seeing the improvements in Kwin, Kickoff menu, Volume Applet, and Dolphin split list animations among others, awesome, thanks!
    At Kickoff I would only correct a small lack of consistency, which is actually spread across Plasma and KDE applications, which would be the mixture of monochrome icons amid colorful icons, in the favorite section the icons should be colored, a yellow star would look great represented.
    Regarding the notification of items moved to the trash, the option to restore the item would be interesting.

    LikeLiked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Ah yes, the monochrome favorites icon is clearly a bug. Will fix.

       LikeLike

17. Not sure about the new volume control. If you are not playing anything, the slider is gray on either side, which might be confusing for anti-technical users.

    LikeLike

    Reply

    1. I agree. Its great idea (my daughter goes to musical primary school, and it was nightmare with remote education to have everything set up good [espeically for her and daughter, to debug if something is muted, set to low, or maybe bad device was selected as output), but but and confusing implementation. But I think that still(if people will get used to it) it’s better what we had til now (I had to run separate pulseaudio monitors, to debug problems with it on live, when lection started 😉

       LikeLike

18. I rly rly hope this addresses the problem of window contents stop being updated (after a day or so in use) unless I move the window.
    I have this issue for some time and it’s so annoying… Usually that happens in Firefox and LibreOffice, in rare cases even clock does not refresh the time 😦
    The only way to get rid of them is to restart app.
    Fingers crossed 🙂

    LikeLike

    Reply

    1. Filed a bug: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=431446
       Attached video too.

       LikeLike

19. Awesome as always!!, quick question, Does anyone had experience this issue with global menu on gtk apps, global menu doesn’t show up when a gtk app opens by first time? I know I should report it but I just want to know if this issue is happening only to me. Nate and all devs thanks for everything.

    LikeLike

    Reply

    1. That was just fixed two days ago! 🙂 See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=422786

       LikeLike

    2. Amazing!!!

       LikeLike

20. There is a plan to integrate the icons from tray (network, audio, battery…) with the icon theme choose from configurations and not the default icons from the plasma theme? For example, use the default Breeze Plasma Theme and Papirus Icon and the icons in tray follow the Papirus’ icons and not the Breeze’s icon.

    LikeLike

    Reply

    1. Probably not until Plasma 6, but yes, I would like this too and plan to push for it.

       LikeLike

21. Hi Nate,

    Would be nice to have the new kickoff available for install as well.

    Very curios to try it (but release is still a month away…).

    Also, any news about an “official kde distro”? (i’ve read somewhere this was being discussed)

    LikeLike

    Reply

22. I hope this new Kickoff menu won’t have switching of categories on hover hard-coded. I prefer clicking (tapping) for such complex menus.

    LikeLiked by 1 person

    Reply

23. > Kate’s “Quick Open” panel now supports fuzzy matching (Waqar Ahmed, Kate 21.04)

    How do I turn that off?

    LikeLike

    Reply

24. O_O wow, great work here! Can’t wait to play with it!

    LikeLike

    Reply

25. I should’ve said this way earlier, but thank you very much for your hard work Nate, and the KDE dev team!
    I miss the days when computing was exciting, with every new version of software doing something awesome, now KDE is doing this.
    I particularly look forward to the Wayland improvements, since I have no choice but to run KDE Plasma with the Wayland session; the writing is on the wall for X11 and is visible right here on my laptop, in the form of severe input lag.
    One complaint so far, is that the “Formats” section in the regional settings dialog is a joke. For the Detailed Settings, if I want to use 24h or a different/custom format for time, currency, etc. the only choice I have is to select a different country’s locale, and you have to go through the whole world before finding the one with the format you like.

    LikeLike

    Reply

    1. Yeah, the formats KCM is pretty terrible. I stumbled on some screenshots of the KDE4 version and saw how much better it used to be. I completely agree with you on that subject.

       Feel free to CC yourself on https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=394698 so you’ll be notified once it gets fixed.

       Thanks for your warm words! I agree, computing used to be fun and exciting, and with KDE, we’ve recaptured some of that magic.

       LikeLike

26. Will it now composite at the correct frame rate automatically, so you don’t have to override MaxFPS if you have a non-60Hz screen?

    LikeLike

    Reply

    1. On Wayland, yes.

       LikeLike

    2. On my RX580, all I need to do is turn on tearfree and set the primary monitor in Display settings you want it to sync with, it will run at that FPS 🙂 … This works for me now on a 240hz (primary) + 75hz setup on the x session. No need for MaxFPS.

       Wayland works perfectly as well 🙂

       LikeLike

    3. I don’t see anything about primary monitor. I think that only applies when you have Multiple monitors. Maybe it has something to do with Nvidia.

       LikeLike

    4. I was assuming you had multiple monitors! Doh! Yes this should work perfectly for you.

       LikeLike

27. Related to displays, can the display settings config ask for confirmation after changing settings? I was messing with options and lost signal to my display, which then meant having to play in config files to restore. If it can ask for confirmation (default no) and revert after 15 seconds or something that’d be great.

    Great to see all the many great improvements. Looks like Plasma 5.21 will be a great release!

    LikeLike

    Reply

    1. In fact, there’s an open MR for it: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kscreen/-/merge_requests/1

       LikeLike

28. “The clipboard applet now closes when you select a history entry with the keyboard, same as when you do so using the mouse (me: Nate Graham, Plasma 5.21)”

    Of course, when I finally got used to this behaviour yo change it back 🙂

    LikeLike

    Reply

29. Now seriously, can’t wait for Plasma 5.21 to arrive.

    A big thank you to all the KDE developers!

    LikeLike

    Reply

30. Good job !
    It would be nice to see the default themes set for better contrast for minimized applications, this wasn’t a problem with the old task manager, but it is with the icon-only tast manager.

    LikeLike

    Reply

31. Where can I leave feedback on the new Kickoff?

    I don’t think that the Application History logically belongs in the “Places” tab. Perhaps there should be a separate “History” section in the Application tab?

    LikeLike

    Reply

32. https://bugs.kde.org – Plasmashell | Application Launcher (Kickoff)

    LikeLike

    Reply

33. re: “People who liked the old Kickoff can download it from store.kde.org using the “Get new widgets” button in the “Add Widgets” panel. Search for “Legacy Kickoff”.”

    A story about this. I just got finished helping a friend with his KDE neon laptop. He’s a Linux enthusiast but not as technical as I am. He doesn’t keep up on the latest news, for example, he just updates when it tells him to.

    Well anyway he said he was disappointed in the new Kickoff replacement menu (appearing in Plasma 5.21.x, which I happen to like). He showed me that when he clicked on the new Application Launcher 2.0 and moved his mouse cursor up into the Favorites area, his cursor naturally grazed over the left column of categories, switching the view away from his Favorites and into some random category. So he then showed me how he had to carefully click the App Launcher, move the mouse straight up to not accidentally trigger any category view. (BTW, he has a standard desktop layout: a task bar on the bottom of the screen with the App Launcher on the left.)

    He really wanted to have the old menu back. No problem I thought, because I remember reading this in your blog post. So I went to your website, typed “kickoff” into the WordPress search box, found the article, found the instruction where to go to the store.kde.org, downloaded the .plasmoid, installed it, switched the menu, and he was happy again.

    I had a few thoughts about this….

    Would it be onerous to add the “Legacy Kickoff” plasmoid back to the default Plasma set of widgets? At least for a few years? Because when I hear the disappointment in my friend’s voice about feeling that he had unintentionally upgraded to this new menu that is less satisfying for him, I imagine there are others out there who feel the same frustration too. And they won’t be reading the latest news and not know how to get the old Kickoff back, or even think it’s possible. They’ll feel stuck and victimized.

    Or conversely, would it be possible to somehow engineer the new App Launcher so that mousing over the column of categories on the way up to the Favorites doesn’t switch away from the default Favorites view?

    I want to say that I really am grateful for everything the developers do, and all for evolving Plasma to be better. I just want to inform them somehow of the consequences of the automatic, subtle changes in functionality.

    Thanks!

    LikeLike

    Reply

    1. Tell him to upgrade to Plasma 5.22 instead 😉 The kickoff will no longer accidentally trigger a caregory

       LikeLiked by 1 person

    2. Thank you Paul for taking time to respond. He had Plasma 5.22 installed and I saw him do it so I could verify that it happened. I tried to reproduce on a spare laptop that I have KDE neon with 5.22 on it, but could not. I also remembered he had used the Oxygen Plasma theme, and even using that I could not reproduce his issue. So I’ll have to try it again on his machine in the future.

       LikeLike