Suggestion: Merge "Showing Desktop" and "Dashboard" mode

Martin Graesslin mgraesslin at kde.org
Sun Jan 19 13:17:15 UTC 2014


Hi all,

the other day Marco and I discussed the state of Dashboard in Plasma 2 and how 
it is supposed to function. The idea is to reuse the desktop windows, hide the 
wallpaper (on compositing) and restack it on top of all other windows.

Obviously that would need some help from the window manager. I thought about 
what would be needed and then had the idea that we could "abuse" 
_NET_SHOWING_DESKTOP [1] for it. Thus if the showing desktop mode is entered 
we do no longer hide the windows but move the desktop windows and it 
transients on to an own dashboard layer. This change would be fully compliant 
with the NetWM spec.

Given that we never really supported the showing desktop mode and I hardly see 
a difference between the showing desktop mode and dashboard this might be a 
nice idea to enhance this mode. Obviously that breaks user's workflow [2] 
because showing desktop will no longer act as minimize all windows. Thus I 
suggest that we introduce a new shortcut in KWin to minimize all desktops (or 
better said turn the existing shortcut into that mode).

Opinions?

Cheers
Martin

[1] http://standards.freedesktop.org/wm-spec/wm-spec-1.4.html#id2559846
[2] https://xkcd.com/1172/
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