grouping tasks in taskbar

[Duncan]

John Woodhouse posted on Wed, 13 May 2015 15:15:41 +0000 as excerpted:

> Here's me on 4.10 and weird things still occur. One that gob smacked
> was that the trash can doesn't behave as an ordinary icon on the
> desktop and is perfectly happy to sit on top of another or maybe the
> others can't detect that it is there. Pass

I haven't had icons on my desktop since, I think when I left MS just 
after the turn of the century.  IIRC back on MS (W98) there were a couple 
that couldn't be removed, but IIRC, by the time I left I had made the icon
(s) transparent, and renamed them with a space or the like, so unless I 
selected them they were invisible or nearly so.

And I never did actually use trash ever, since I started on computers 
before a delete that wasn't delete became popular, and I quickly learned 
to only delete what I wanted well and truly deleted.  In dolphin I have 
trash set to 0.001%, ~200 kB (on a 20 GB /home so 200 kB is indeed about 
1/1000 of 1 percent), the smallest I seem to be able to set it, and set 
to warn, and move to trash set to confirm as well, as I pretty much 
always mean actual delete.

As I've already hinted, I don't have a visible panel either.  I do have a 
small autohide panel, configured small enough I have to effectively hit a 
corner (bottom right) to raise it.  I really wish panels were part of 
activities, so I could have fixed panels on some activities and not 
others, but oh, well...  Maybe with plasma5 (which I can't get to run as 
kwin5 immediately goes into a crash and respawn cycle, every time I've 
tried to test kde5/plasma5 anyway, which I've been doing every six months 
or so, I think kwin doesn't like my radeon turks video or perhaps my 
triple-monitor desktop layout).

Anything I launch routinely is on my hotkey launcher menus, which I had a 
huge problem with and had to basically script my own solution for with 
kde4, since khotkeys in kde4 doesn't support chained hotkeys like kde3's 
khotkeys did.  Between that and krunner, I very seldom use the actual 
application menu (kickoff, FWIW), tho I do have it on the panel, along 
with a "classic" menu set to bookmarks-only.  I also have the quick-
access browser there, which is basically a fly-out menu filesystem 
browser.  It's set to open to a directory which contains symlinks to all 
the important dirs on the system, so I can open pretty much any file on 
the system with only a few clicks).  Those three plasmoids (kickoff, 
bookmarks, quick-access, along with the standard notifier/systray, are 
all I have in the panel, as I want to keep it small.

> 
> I also wonder why when I hot plug a hard drive of usb why find files aka
> kfind has no problem finding all of the files that match a search term -
> dolphin search - no. It's happy to miss some.

Dolphin search is based on baloo, the indexer.  Last I used it, which to 
be fair was 4.6 era when the indexer was still nepomuk, the indexer 
couldn't properly track non-permanently-available files, in USB attached 
storage, or simply partitions not mounted by default.  If they haven't 
fixed that, or if they have but you have to enable an option somewhere to 
turn it on and you haven't done so, that would explain dolphin search not 
seeing the detachable storage.

kfind, meanwhile, is I believe still using a conventional real-time 
search.  So when the detachable storage is detached, it doesn't see it, 
when it's attached, it sees it, just as one would expect.  Tho to be 
fair, since it's real-time searching, it's going to return hits slower 
than if they're pre-indexed and it simply has to do a database query, 
which is where the indexer thing is /supposed/ to shine... if it didn't 
suck so badly in the process.

(FWIW, since the 4.6 era I have had USE=-semantic-desktop set at build 
time since I dropped anything kdepim related, and thus akonadi, which 
otherwise required USE=semantic-desktop, so don't even build it, except 
for a strigi stub which is required as various bits of kde link to it, 
and that was 4.6 era when it became clear what a cluster**** akonadized 
kmail was and I switched to claws-mail to be able to kill akonadi and the 
entire semantic-desktop with fire!)


> Plus the desktop needs rebooting via a log out at times but this has
> not caused me any serious problems so far. Neither have one or two
> desktop freezes, I have no idea what caused those or the need for
> restarting kde.

I don't have that problem, but what I /do/ have is a problem (kde bug 
321781) with plasma failing to see the configured activities when it 
starts, and always starting with a new/default activity (blank/empty 
here, but on most distros would simply be the default plasmoid setup).  
I've had that since 4.9 or so, IIRC.  Early on I discovered that I could 
get plasma to regain its memory if I killed and restarted just plasma 
(tho it still starts with the default/empty, but at least it registers 
the others and they can be switched to), so now I have a script set to 
run at startup, that does just that, waits a bit, kills plasma, waits a 
few more seconds, and restarts it.  Works well enough, but a lot of folks 
don't have the scripting ability to do that, even if they did work it 
out, and if they're affected by this bug, they'd simply be stuck with a 
default activity at each kde startup, forgetting whatever customizations 
they made to it.  Which would be the end of kde for me, as I HEAVILY 
customize and I couldn't live with that, so I'm lucky I could script 
around it.

FWIW, that bug seems to be related to the pictures-of-the-day wallpaper 
feature, or perhaps something else (the comic plasmoid, or yawp, yet 
another weather plasmoid?) that connects to the net for updates.  I 
discovered that when systemd's networkd had a bug that didn't connect the 
network, and the activities came up just fine!

Again, if I could get kwin5 to work and thus hopefully plasma5, I could 
see if the bug still occurred there, and if so, could report that and 
possibly get it fixed before the devs' attention wanders away to plasma6 
or whatever, but...

> From time to time the screen can't keep up with my typing rate. It lags
> well behind and here's me using an HP Xeon workstation with rather a lot
> of ram. Rebooting kde usually sorts that out.

I wonder if that's indexing related...?  I've not seen anything like that 
since I started building kde without semantic-desktop...

> Mail has never been a problem for me on 4. I still run kdepim3 and as
> always it sits there doing it's job faultlessly, compacting and etc
> just as it should.

That's good.  Gentoo dropped all of kde3, and hasn't done the trinity 
desktop continuance either.  Tho there's a user-run and supported overlay 
called kde-sunset, that has kde3, and maybe trinity by now.

Meanwhile, I dumped anything kdepim related and switched to claws-mail 
for both mail (was kmail) and feeds (was akregator).  Very good choice, 
too, tho doing the migration wasn't exactly easy.

> The dreaded file index issues seem to have disappeared but have they?
> Of late I notice a pregnant pause when I save files.

I wouldn't know, since as I said, I've been building kde without semantic-
desktop since late 4.6.

What I do know is I have no use for it, and when the gentoo/kde devs 
decided for a time they weren't going to have the option to build without 
it, I was maintaining the patch-set to disable it myself, to avoid having 
it on my system again.  I'd have sooner switched to enlightenment or 
something, dropping kde entirely, than have that semantic-desktop 
bloatware on my system again.

With kde5 I don't know what's going to happen in that regard.  So far, 
gentoo/kde5 is requiring baloo, etc, for the basic kde5/plasma5 desktop, 
but I'm not sure whether they (and upstream kde/plasma) plan to kill that 
requirement before it goes gentoo-stable or not.  Gentoo/qt took a long 
time to get qt5 in the tree, and gentoo/kde got behind because of that.  
So while qt5 is in the tree now along with kde-frameworks5, plasma5 and 
the other kde5 apps are still only in the gentoo/kde overlay, so forget 
stable, they're not even in the main tree yet, which means there's still 
time to kill the semantic-desktop dependencies, if upstream kde doesn't 
require them at least.

Anyway, I figure to the extent it's required, I'll give it ago again with 
kde5, at least to try it out, but I'm rather skeptical.  At some point, 
if I can't build kde5/plasma5 without baloo and related semantic-desktop 
deps, I expect I'll be off kde entirely, just as I was ultimately off 
kmail entirely when it akonadified, despite a decade running it, and just 
as I was off MS when they jumped the shark and wanted to require remote 
OK of my desktop with eXPrivacy, which I wasn't about to give them, and 
DIDN'T give them, again, after a decade of running MS.

On my short list to try are enlightenment and lxde-qt.  We'll see...

> I don't seem to have any taskbar problems other than having again of
> late to leave them where they happen to pop up when added. I don't seem
> to be able to drag them where I want any more or couldn't last time
> I tried.

No taskbar here so...

> When I look at the final result of kde4 all I really see is a different
> method of presenting folders - that actually I don't use as I am happy
> with my cluttered desktop and even use it for temp storage at times. I
> don't see any real improvement from a usability point of view. Not
> surprising really as windows is mature technology and re arranging how
> various things look wont change that at all.
> 
> Could it be that KDE5 will happen for what was the probably the real
> real reason for 4 - rather difficult to do any significant work on 3.
> Grows like topsy etc. :-) I sometimes think that Linux's committee type
> approach to additions is rather sensible.
> 
> No point bleating about kde releases being sub beta really because this
> is part why there are distro's about. We use and report bugs.At some
> point they get fixed - maybe. What disturbs me was that initial KDE4 was
> in real terms unusable. OpenSuse put some in for us to look at. On the
> next release it went full 4 along with the associated problems. I'm
> glad they still left some 3 that could still be installed. Just goes
> to show how shallow the changes really are - just candy really.
> 
> I here rumours about 5 going what is usually called upstream from the
> desktop, sort of taking over from the lib people. Indexing nearly killed
> kde other than for die hards and I can't help wondering what further
> marauding in that general direction will do.
> 
> I also note that this mailing list is near dead compared with how it
> used to be on 3.

Well, in kde3 things generally worked well enough, and I never got to the 
kde lists.  I subscribed when I was having trouble switching to the still 
alpha kde 4.2... because while kde3 was still available in gentoo at the 
time, its days were numbered as upstream kde had dropped support (despite 
the very famous promise that kde3 would be supported as long as there 
were users... there are **STILL** users!!), and I was getting off it 
before I was forced to jump off.

But to be fair, most folks will be using kde forums... or kde's facebook 
page or whatever if there is one.  Mailing lists feel a bit like 
newsgroups, now, both rather dated technology...  Tho the tech types 
never really took to facebook, and I never did have an account either 
there or on myspace.  I don't really like web forums either.  Newsgroups, 
and mailing lists particularly when I can read/write from/to them as 
newsgroups, which is what I do here via gmane.org's list2news service, 
are still my preferred social and technical internet meeting format.

-- 
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

___________________________________________________
This message is from the kde mailing list.
Account management:  https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde.
Archives: http://lists.kde.org/.
More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.