Proposal: use Icon Tasks as our default taskmanager.

[Mark]

Hi,

I was unpleasantly surprised by a range of very annoying task manager bugs.

1. Ghosting still seems to be an issue. Even though i do have Qt 4.8.1. I
haven't re-opened https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=275469 yet since i
think the ghosting doesn't occur in icon tasks.
2. Sometimes taskbars seem to be overlapping. It's very efficient use of
space and perhaps usable for tablets but i rather dislike it. hehehe,
anyway, there is a bug report for that as well:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=275469
3. Task Manager sometimes seems to forget which applications are pinned.
They are back again when the user logs out and back in. (restarting
plasma-desktop is probably also an option)
4. Minimize effect could go all ways with taskmanager. Sometime even to the
middle of the screen. This issue happens so darn often! At first i thought
it only occurred when i was opening a non Qt app. However, when testing
that by opening KDE only apps (dolphin, konqueror, system settings and a
few others) i still kept seeing minimize effect go either to the wrong
taskbar item or even to the middle of the screen!

Those issues are very very very noticeable and disruptive. It just gives a
bad impression. And then we still have an alternative taskbar called Icon
Tasks which seems to do a way better job then our default Task Manager. So
perhaps it might be a wise decision to simply throw Task Manager out and
use Icon Tasks as our default task manager. It doesn't seem to have any of
the above mentioned issues though it does miss some things that should
probably be added to Icon Tasks first before it can take over from Task
Manager. Just the things that i can see now that (imho) have to be added:

1. Switch to disable peek
2. Switch to show the "icons" as bars just like task manager does.
3. Switch to sort open and closed tasks. Meaning you have all the closed
tasks as icons in the left of your taskbar and all the open ones as bars
next to the closed ones.

Icon tasks is already shipped with KDE since version 4.8 (or 4.7?). The
things that have to be added to it to make it a full taskmanager
replacement is fairly minor so why not?

So all things considered, why don't we pull the plug for taskmanager and
start using icon tasks by default?
Would this be on time for KDE 4.9?

Kind regards,
Mark
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