Review Request 116076: Hide the OnAllDesktops button if there is only one virtual desktop

[Martin Gräßlin]

On Wednesday 26 February 2014 16:42:56 Thomas Lübking wrote:
> On Mittwoch, 26. Februar 2014 16:27:47 CEST, Hugo Pereira Da Costa wrote:
> > Note: a disable state could be quite easily added to oxygen. I
> > would reuse the same appearance as for inactive windows, except
> > that the button would stay 'inactive' even for active windows,
> > and would of course not highlight on mouse-over.
> > That's quite easy to implement, also.
> > 
> > What do you think ?
> 
> It's been one of the major religious wars about titlebars: what to do with
> (temporarily) unsupported buttons.
> 
> Personally, i LARGELY favor the approach where the button layout remains the
> same and a unusable button (cannot eg. maximize/minimize) is simply
> represented deactivated, but KDE has by default always done different (more
> like Windows, less like MacOS)
> 
> Arguments are that there's no point in crowding the titlebar with a UI
> element that will likely never activate and on the other hand the stable
> layout is more "reliable" for the user ("the outer right button is always
> maximize and not suddenly close")

I'm extending the discussion to the complete desktop to get some further ideas 
on whether we should change the behavior in 5.0.

For the Plasma devs: if a window is not closeable (or minimizeable or 
whatever) KWin is currently hiding the button. The alternative would be to 
have it always present but disabled if the action is not available.

Personally I think it's highly questionable that we remove the buttons as that 
means the UI is inconsistent. On some windows there is one, on others there is 
none which can result in incorrect clicks and unexpected behavior. It's also 
very uncommon with respect to other elements. We don't hide the Apply button 
if there is nothing to Apply, instead we deactivate it.

So IMHO we should use the chance of the major release and change our behavior 
to not hide the buttons but disable them with the exception of the help button 
which would just clutter the UI.

Cheers
Martin
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