KDE4 desktop or panel shortcuts

[Duncan]

Gere Kiss Zsolt posted on Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:21:08 +0200 as excerpted:

> Duncan, thank you very much for this long and exhaustive reply.

That's my style.  It obviously takes time and some folks hate my replies 
(and a few killfile me) because they think I'm too wordy, but I have 
stacks of thanks from folks, too, so it's helping people, which is the 
reason I bother. So... Thanks!  =:^)

> BTW: so much changes, new terms, new names for same functionality
> apps... this might be a bit hard to follow. And may confuse, of course.

Of course, kde4's plasma-desktop combines the functionality of kde3's 
kicker and kdesktop, allowing plasmoids/widgets to move from one to the 
other, entirely new functionality (plus there's now activities, and so 
much more plasma-desktop does than the kde3 kicker and kdesktop did...), 
so a new name for the combined functionality makes sense.

But a couple of the name changes make very little sense at all.  What's 
now inaccurately called system settings was a far more accurate kcontrol 
in kde3.  System-settings is inaccurate, because the modules kde ships for 
it control mostly kde-specific settings, not the entire system, and user-
specific settings, not all users.  Thinking about it a bit, kde couldn't 
really effectively ship a system settings anyway, beyond a limited set, 
because it runs on both the BSDs and on Linux (plus parts of it run on MS 
and Apple platforms), and between that and the various distributions that 
ship kde, system init setups are different, packaging systems are 
different, filesystem locations may be different, etc, so how could kde 
ship a proper system settings even if it wanted to?  No, these are, with 
some noted exceptions such as setting the time (if allowed by the 
distribution's security config), single-user specific and kde-specific 
settings, so kcontrol is a far more accurate name than system-settings.

Of course, system-settings is impossibly generic as well.  How does one 
even know for sure that it's the kde control settings one is referring 
to?  And certainly, kcontrol is *FAR* more effective to try to google than 
system-settings.

But, if you look at the files that are the actual kcontrol modules, 
they're still named *.kcm, with kcm an entirely logical extension for 
kcontrol module, but entirely illogical for the generic system settings.

Similarly with ksysguard, now called system-monitor, only here, the 
problem is worse, because there's all the system monitor plasmoids in 
addition to the system monitor application.  At least here, they /are/ 
generally monitoring some aspect of the system, so the name is reasonably 
accurate, but it's simply too generic to be useful, is impossible to 
google properly, and causes confusion even if limited to the kde context, 
due to all the various applets also called system monitors.

Those are two of my pet gripes.  I'm sure the regulars here are tired of 
them, particularly the system-settings one, which I have to explain every 
time I refer someone to kcontrol, because I refuse to call it system 
settings, so I have to explain it every single time.  And given the number 
of kcontrol settings in kcontrol... =:^/

So yeah, there are new names, but if the old ones were actually accurate 
and googlable and the new ones aren't, I won't use the new ones.  But 
fortunately, plasma or at least plasma-desktop, is reasonably googlable, 
and at least as descriptive as kicker and kdesktop were, so...

>> > then selecting an
>> > application, and on a right-click you'll get a context menu, with
>> > 'Add to Desktop | Add to Panel' menupoints (thanks, Anne!). This will
>> > port also the graphical icon, but I still don't know how to
>> > change/find it...:(  Also, when added to the panel, can it be moved
>> > there? It seems that no.
>>
>> Phani mentioned the properties thing...
>>
>>
> WHAT? Here I do not understand.

I see you've already replied to him, and understand it there.  I was 
simply saying I had nothing more to add to what he said, so was referring 
you to his post for that bit.

But I've something to add, now. =:^)

You mention that you can't change the icon directly, only thru the filetype 
dialog.  That again indicates that you're dealing with symlinks or the 
files themselves, not *.desktop files.  You probably figured it out 
already.  But a warning for anyone else coming across this.  As a bit of 
thought might suggest, if you change the icon for a filetype, you're 
changing it for all files of that filetype.  That's likely not what's 
intended in this case.

>> Unfortunately, some of the helpcenter documentation is still kde3
>> vintage, I believe.  As such, as you mention, not all of it will be
>> helpful, and some may actually be seriously confusing if you don't
>> realize how outdated it might be.  Reading it with the caveat that some
>> parts of it may no longer apply, tho, it can still be quite helpful, as
>> much of it /does/ still apply, and read with that caveat in mind, the
>> still-helpful parts can be picked out without the now obsolete parts
>> being /too/ confusing.
>>
> And how can the user decide if some part applies or not? I believe that
> if some kde3 descriptions do not apply, they should not be included in
> the kde4 documentation. If some components of a software are outdated,
> they are not included in the release. This should apply to a
> documentation release as well. When a user opens the KDE Help Center
> (for a given KDE version), she expects to get information about THAT
> software, and not some other outdated one. This kind of mess is very
> confusing and misleading.

Well, here's the deal.  Remember that kde is Free Software (free/libre, 
free as in freedom).  As such, many of the devs are volunteers, and with 
kde as with many Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects, 
while there may be sponsors for individual aspects of the project, there's 
no single company responsible for coordinating everything, and most 
importantly, for paying people to do documentation.  Unfortunately, as 
with a lot of FLOSS projects, that means the documentation often falls 
drastically behind, because the devs don't keep it up, they're too busy 
writing functional code, which is more fun than writing docs, and fixing 
bugs, which may be less fun but broken code with good docs does nobody any 
good, while functional code with broken docs... can at least be used if 
you take the time to experiment a bit with it, asking on the various 
mailing lists, forums, etc, where necessary.

As it happened, a lot of the docs were already somewhat outdated by the 
last years of kde3 (basically the whole 3.5.x series), as they'd been 
written years earlier and not really been kept upto date.  I wasn't 
following kde closely enough to know for sure then, and I probably 
wouldn't know now either, but given the quality of the existing if 
outdated docs, I have the feeling someone sponsored some major 
documentation work somewhere about kde 3.3 or 3.4, getting it in 
reasonably good shape then, and some of that documentation hasn't been 
touched much if at all, since.

At some point, hopefully, someone sponsors/contributes a lot of doc work 
again, and everything gets updated.  But until then... some of it gets 
updated if the devs responsible for that kde module update it, other bits 
don't really get touched -- which includes nobody even taking time to 
review the docs and decide which bits are so hopelessly outdated as to be 
more confusing than help, so they just keep shipping it.

Of course, both kde and the world keep moving on, and as can be seen in a 
lot of the plasmoids, for instance, a net connection is ever more taken 
for granted.  What has happened is that user contribution based wikis are 
taking up a lot of the documentation slack, and that's certainly true 
here, as that's what userbase is all about.  Which rather brings us full 
circle, since userbase was mentioned pretty close to the beginning of the 
thread. =:^)

So what'll likely eventually happen is that someone will go thru and rip 
out most of the stale documentation as shipped, and the help pointers now 
pointing at stale docs will instead be pointed at the appropriate userbase 
page.  Hopefully, when they do that, they at least update and add a bunch 
of new what's-this pointers, so that at least works, and people can go to 
userbase for more if needed, but I'm honestly not sure how realistic that 
is.  Unfortunately, kde documentation has been outdated for years, and 
that wouldn't seem likely to change anytime soon.

Unless of course someone (best, someone who can bring some friends! =;^) 
with the time and energy to do so decides to make it their contribution to 
kde, and really goes to it.  As with the kde i18n (internationalization) 
and artwork contributors, documentation doesn't take a lot of developer 
knowledge, only a lot of time and patience, and a willingness to email/IRC 
devs and /ask/, if the functionality isn't understood after a bit of 
research.

The trouble is, apparently, most folks (me included) who can answer what a 
particular thing does, can't be bothered to write the docs and figure out 
where to post the updates, while those who are actually looking at the 
docs, are doing so because they don't know, so can't answer the questions 
about it, either.

>> Please avoid posting in HTML when you post to the list.

> I am sorry, I did not include them intentionally.

It's there again.  See below for a snippet (tho how it looks at that end I 
can't tell, maybe Google formats it all even in the quote, and it looks 
fine [shrug]).  I don't have a gmail account so can't help you directly, 
but from what I've seen from others, they (unfortunately) default to HTML 
unless you turn it off, but it /can/ be turned off somewhere in the mail 
options. You're not the first and won't be the last to be entirely unaware 
of it.

> Duncan, thank you very much for this long and exhaustive reply.
> <br><br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote"
> style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204,
> 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> What DOES normally have a configurable icon
> is a *.desktop file.  These<br>

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman

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