New task manager

[Duncan]

René J.V. Bertin posted on Mon, 25 Oct 2021 11:09:47 +0200 as excerpted:

> On Monday October 25 2021 01:09:31 Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
> 
>>OTOH, I do have a tablet (a Surface Go) on which I installed my standard
>>Arch-with-KDE. And there I appreciate the fact that touch support is
>>being worked on – even on X11.
> 
> Sure, but that's something else, right? There are desktop computers with
> a touchscreen, at least those hybrid notebooks.
> There used to be a "netbook" config that you could install with KDE4, as
> opposed to a desktop config. But that can of course just have been
> something concocted at the distribution level.

If you're talking about the plasma layout choice, where desktop and 
folderview are the current choices but in the plasma4 era there was IIRC 
two more, "newspaper" (basically a long vertically scrollable desktop) 
and another for tablets or something that I more dimly remember as I 
played with it less because it didn't seem to do much for a traditional 
desktop config (newspaper was at least somewhat interesting, tho I didn't 
end up keeping it and switched back to desktop after playing a bit, 
luckily as newspaper disappeared as an option), those were from (kde) 
plasma upstream.

>>While KDE4 was running well in later stages, I actually prefer the
>>aesthetics of KDE5. The gradients and borders and so on were too thick
>>and took up too much space.
> 
> You could configure those, and the waste of space in widget styles was
> much less. Compare the Oxygen style from back then and what it is now,
> how much more compact it used to be.

FWIW, oxygen widgets (app-style) here, ktrans (from kdelook, I've used it 
since the plasma4 era as I like the transparent backgrounds) plasma style.

Windecos are a significantly more complicated story.

I /was/ using the kdelook blacksquare aurorae windeco for quite awhile, 
as adjusted to tiny buttonsize it trimmed down the vertical titlebar 
padding quite a bit more than is as-shipped-possible with most other 
windecos including the builtin oxygen (which I otherwise prefer) and 
breeze windecos and the builtin plastik aurorae windeco.

But when gentoo switched to libglvnd for vendor-independent gl handling, 
it triggered some sort of bug between libglvnd/mesa/amdgpu/kwin that 
rendered all aurorae-based windecos invisible -- windows would still 
position as if they were there and you could click the invisible titlebar 
buttons if you knew where they were, but they simply weren't drawn.  That 
was of course still on X, and AFAIK the bug still exists today (it 
remained for months and was still there last time I checked on X, wayland 
being what I use now).

So I switched to the oxygen windeco which would have been my choice 
anyway, were the vertical titlebar padding not so ridiculously space-
wasting.

Turns out it was easier to find and patch out the oxygen windeco space-
wasting padding than it was to find whatever bug was triggering the 
aurorae-engine windeco titlebar draw failures.  I'm not a dev so couldn't 
properly code up a GUI config for it, but I did post a bug for it and 
attached my padding-slimming hack-patches as proof-of-concept so the devs 
could see what I wanted.  FWIW:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=425874

And since I'm on gentoo which does build-from-sources by default, once I 
had patches doing what I need I can simply drop them in the appropriate 
directory to get them auto-applied to all future updates -- which can be 
as frequently as once or twice a week when I update the system, since I'm 
running pretty much all of kde-frameworks/plasma/gear live-git using the 
gentoo/kde project's live-git ebuilds.

A few months later I switched from X to wayland and aurorae-based windecos 
worked properly again as that bug turned out to be X-only, tho of course 
there were other wayland-only bugs I had to workaround or hack-patch.  
But as I said I preferred the oxygen windeco already were it not for the 
ridiculous space-wasting titlebar padding, and the libglvnd bug had 
forced me to hack-patch around that so now oxygen as built with the hack-
patch remains my preferred windeco. =:^)

Maybe someday they'll add a config option to shrink all that unnecessary 
titlebar padding and I can drop my local patch, but until then I'll keep 
applying it, updating it when necessary (running live-git makes that easy 
since I can bisect to the breaking commit, look at it, and figure out if 
my patch is still necessary or not and if so what I need to change to 
update my patch to continue to apply) and have a nice oxygen windeco 
without the space-wastage.

-- 
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