Just my opinion

[Scott_S]

Ahem. Though of course I believe it to be indisputable fact. I know there are those who will completely disagree with me and those who will say I should tell the devs. O.K. Just saying.
I personally find the Plasma desktop to be elegant but cumbersome and unintuitive. Here are some reasons I think so.

The panel. I I want to move items around I have to enter edit mode which I find completely unnecessary and inconvenient, plus the desktop becomes completely unusable otherwise while you are in edit mode. I think you should be able to just right click the panel and lock or unlock the items. As well you could individually lock or unlock individual items by right clicking them specifically regardless of the general panel settings. None of this would make everything else fade to background and remain there till you are done.

Dolphin. Having to switch tabs to view the directory structure and your location after clicking a place is inconvenient. Just have the drive/partition it’s in in devices pop out drop down and highlight the location. you can navigate through the rest of the system right from there.

Whose idea was it to leave drag and drop out of the applications menu?

I wonder why you can’t launch a web browser from bookmarks in the menu based on which one you had set as the system default.

I find all of the Linux desktop to have similar or related characteristics.

However I have to say it is much preferable than having to do things the way somebody tells you to or not be able to use it at all instead of just the way the system is built because it needs to be to perform it’s function.

I ain’t leavin’

I really believe this has more to do with why Linux isn’t more popular than just about any other reason.

[deano_ferrari]

@Scott_S

Whose idea was it to leave drag and drop out of the applications menu?

I wonder why you can’t launch a web browser from bookmarks in the menu based on which one you had set as the system default.

These are really questions for the KDE developers rather than the openSUSE community. You’re unlikely to get definitive answers here.

If you’re interested in the rationale behind those design decisions, or want to discuss/suggest changes, the best place to ask is the KDE community really

KDE Discuss

That’s where you can engage with developers directly.

[Scott_S]

I know.

…

Hmm not enough characters…? O.K. how’s that?

Yeah, I should huh?

[john_hudson]

On what basis and on what evidence do you say, ‘all of the Linux desktop to have similar or related characteristics’? Gnome was explicitly developed to be different from KDE while LXQT and Xfce are quite different from either of them.

Of course there are underlying characteristics shared by all Linux desktops but my experience as a user is that each has features which make using it significantly different for the user.

[jonc]

You sound like you’d be happier with GNOME as your DE. Simple, but elegant. KDE is designed to be customizable and configurable.

[knurpht]

@Scott_S

Whose idea was it to leave drag and drop out of the applications menu?

Where do you get that. I just unpinned Kate, readded it again by dragging it from the application menu on the panel. It shows a black hand icon when one can releases. I’v built my entire bottom panel that way.

[Scott_S]

Well, I meant from one place in the menu to another to rearrange it.
Having to use edit mode to move items. No simple pane with places and devices with simple expand drop down and highlight. No drag and drop in menus…Seems to be common. I think Cinnamon likes to keep tree and places in separate views.

[knurpht]

Just for my understanding: You want to f.e. drag LibreOffice Writer from Office → Multimedia ?

[dcurtisfra]

@Scott_S:

Please be aware that, Linux «and for that matter also UNIX®» has a Standard for the entries in a Desktop’s menu – as usual, ArchWiki has quite a good introduction to this topic: <Desktop entries>

Further more, in the (Desktop) Standard document, there’s a list of common (registered) Categories → <Registered Categories>

• with a list of additional categories on the next page in that document.

---

The key to where any application will appear in a Menu structure – regardless of the Desktop Environment being used – is the “Categories=” entry in the application’s ‘.desktop’ file –

 > cat /usr/etc/xdg/autostart/org.opensuse.opensuse_welcome_launcher.desktop
# Copy me to /etc/xdg/autostart and /usr/share/applications
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Welcome launcher
Exec=/usr/bin/opensuse-welcome-launcher
Icon=org.opensuse.opensuse_welcome_launcher
Comment=The openSUSE Welcome launcher utility.
Categories=Qt;System;Documentation
GenericName=Welcome launcher Utility
 >

[dezza]

KDE has always been a mess.

but at least its a configurable mess compared to GNOME.

Its similar to Firefox in those regards, everything can be styled and reordered. Thats why we love it!

[karlggest]

@Scott_S

Dolphin. Having to switch tabs to view the directory structure and your location after clicking a place is inconvenient. Just have the drive/partition it’s in in devices pop out drop down and highlight the location. you can navigate through the rest of the system right from there.

I’m not sure what you mean here. Dolphin uses a complete tree structures if you like that.

@Scott_S

As well you could individually lock or unlock individual items by right clicking them specifically regardless of the general panel settings

Ok, but what is exactly the difference? Now: click anyway in panel, click Show the panel setting, move your element. Click Exit. Your way: click in the element, click unlock, move your element, click done.

[dart364]

@dezza

KDE has always been a mess.

but at least its a configurable mess

[dcurtisfra]

@dezza

KDE has always been a mess.

KDE seems to be attempting to strictly adhere to the details of every UNIX® and Linux and freedesktop.org {fd.o} [formerly X Desktop Group (XDG)] standard related to a Desktop Environment.

• BTW – the freedesktop.org project was founded by Havoc Pennington, a GNOME developer working for Red Hat in March 2000.

Therefore, the KDE project isn’t responsible for the “mess” in the current specification of a Desktop Environment as defined by the standards …

• It’s merely a fairly complete implementation of the Desktop Environment specification as defined by the standards …

[deano_ferrari]

The freedesktop.org standards mainly define interoperability between desktop environments and applications. They generally don’t dictate how Plasma or Dolphin should look or behave from a UI perspective. The design and workflow of the UI being discussed here are choices made by the KDE project itself, so feedback on those is best directed upstream to KDE rather than attributed to freedesktop.org.

[dcurtisfra]

@deano_ferrari:

A standard merely defines the expected behaviour to some level of detail –

• Presumably GNOME is also using the same DE standards as KDE but, the interpretation of the details as defined by the relevant standards documents differs between the various DE implementations …

[deano_ferrari]

@dcurtisfra You’re conflating interoperability standards with interface design.

The design of Plasma and its applications isn’t governed by the freedesktop.org specifications. Those standards define how desktop environments and applications interoperate, not how they should look or behave from a UX perspective.

The UI and workflow are guided by KDE’s own Human Interface Guidelines (HIG):

KDE Human Interface Guidelines

[dezza]

I was merely joking when I wrote it I have run and been impressed by plasma since it started becoming really good around the 2012-ish time… It was quite impressive how everything incl. power management, suspend etc. worked straight out the box with a brand new install on minimal textinstall distro. Just install the desktop and go!

I started out my new laptop back then like that, and have since taking a liking to it, currently running it as well…

[tckosvic]

To revert back to the first discussion item, the mate desktop panel allows you to right click on a panel item, unlock it and move it to where you wish.

tom kosvic

[jsmith64]

@Scott_S

I wonder why you can’t launch a web browser from bookmarks in the menu based on which one you had set as the system default.

Do you have bookmarks in your menu?

I do. I export the bookmarks from the browser which creates a bookmarks.html file. Then I use a little GUI app that I made to process the bookmarks.html file and export them as the old style Microsoft .url files. I have 20,841 bookmarks as .url files.

From there they are indexable by baloo and they show up in Krunner and searches from Dolphin, and in your menu when you type in the search box.

There’s a little script in my ~/bin folder called ieurl.sh. Set your file association to open .url files with ieurl.sh and the URL’s open in your default browser when you click or double click on them.

The information is out there.

You can export your bookmarks from your browser and use Keditbookmarks to export them from the html file as .url files. But Keditbookmarks chokes on 20,000 bookmarks, so I used a script then later made a GUI for it.

If you don’t have a ton of bookmarks, keditbookmarks will do a good job, except it does have problems with spaces in bookmark names if you store them on a NTFS partition. It’ll make .url files that you cannot delete because some websites use characters that are invalid or invisible when used for file names. It’s a real trick to figue out what hidden characters are in the name so you can delete or even edit them.

Tip. When you save a bookmark edit the name so it describes what it is for and remove anything like stars, flags, or whatever isn’t text.

You must add Keditbookmarks to your menu because it doesn’t install a desktop file for the menu.

Here’s the ieurl.sh script.

#!/usr/bin/bash
sed 's/^URL=/URL=/' "$1" | grep -m 1 '^URL=' | sed 's/^URL=//' | sed 's/\r//' | xargs xdg-open
#

So your oping bookmarks from your menu problem is solved if you can make the .url files. Plasma is a powerful desktop and you can make it do about anything by researching your problem.

I can’t stand the black and white symbolic icon trend. I buy a nice color monitor and I get B&W icons. No thanks. I gathered all of the nice color icons that I could find and made a few, like a 3D blue fan blade icon for Cooler Control.

Deploying an icon isn’t as simple as you think. You need different sizes and they have to go in different folders etc. A different size is used depending on where it’s displayed and, in Dolphin, it depends on the view mode and zoom level.

I’ve been testing my GUI app that takes an icon that you load into it and it deploys icons of different sizes (resizes on the fly) into .local/share/icons/ICON-THEME/ in the following user selectable folders:

16x16, 22x22, 32x32, 48x48, 64x64, 96x96 128x128, 256x256, applets, base, hicolor and scalable. The top level folders also have sub-folders (apps, applets, devices, places, status) etc. That’s where appropriate sized icons go (48x48/apps/app-name.png or .svg/svgz). That’s on Tab one (Icon Deployer).

Tab two (Theme Architect) creates the icon index.theme file by analyzing the folder structure then formatting the data to the Freedesktop specification for icon index.theme files.

I’ll be posting and sharing that as soon as I’m done testing it. It’s working good now but, I’m taking a break. I’ve replaced my icon theme from backup countless times. Now I can replace a dozen icons with about 25-30 clicks, instead of doing it the hard way. It makes building a custom icon theme simple.

I know that’s not something you brought up, but when you have a problem look for a solution to it. Many people have customized Plasma and just go on with their life, unless you ask…do you know how to do this?

Oh, and try right clicking on something in Places and selecting "Open in Split View). There’s your folder tree. Add the “pop” toolbar button and all you have to do is click it and the folder tree in the split view will pop open in a new window (it also returns your original Dolphin to its previous state without a split view).