[kde-community] Plasmoids and Apps - was - Re: Applications in KDE Generation 5

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday, January 15, 2014 22:56:12 Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> El Dimecres, 15 de gener de 2014, a les 21:47:17, John Layt va escriure:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > * Do we need small utilities like KCalc as stand-alone apps, or do
> > they belong in Workspaces, perhaps as Plasmoids?  Where do we draw the
> > line between them?  And if there's both a Plasmoid and an App for
> > something, which goes in the main release?
> 
> Please don't force plasmoids down my throat. 

That is not a real threat, and phrasing it like it is a real threat feels 
extremely disrespectful. As the person who came up with and used to maintain 
this part of KDE, It makes me feel like you think I’ve been wandering around 
forcing people to do things they don’t want to and that makes me feel very 
uncomfortable.

> Why would i want a calculator
> as a plasmoid instead of an application? So that i need to minimize all my
> other apps to see the desktop to see it instead of just alt-tabbing?

What’s worse than insulting another person is doing so from ignorance.

We’ve had plasma-windows for ages now which runs plasmoids in their own 
independent window like a mini application. For apps like ksnapshot and kcalc 
the results would be identical or nearly so (kcalc would require support for 
putting a menu[bar] somewhere, or reorganizing how those particular features 
are presented).

(I won’t even get into the dashboard or panels ...)

We also have an “application” form factor for plasmoids for ~1 year now which 
allows these components to make useful adjustments between being embedded as a 
plasmoid component and being run as a top-level window.

I don’t think it makes huge amounts of sense to turn ksnapshot into a 
plasmoid, but KCalc probably would as it would give us feature parity between 
the version on the desktop (and panels). Right now we have 2 calculators with 
differing features and levels of maintenance. 

Should we force kcalc to port to QML and become a plasmoid? No, because it is 
up to the maintainer .. but I think we ought to think about these things in 
non-reactive, accurate technical terms where the goal is ‘what is the best end 
result for the user’.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo