Activity switcher problems [for Plasma and KWin teams]

[Ivan Čukić]

Hi all,

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to join the hangout today to discuss this (I'll 
be mostly away for this week).

So, the issue is that:

1) the activity switcher opens up too slow. The user would expect for it to be 
shown instantaneously. At first, my plan was to add a delay, check whether the 
meta key is still pressed and then show the switcher (the same behaviour as 
alt+tab), but that was not possible due to slow opening.

2) If the activities in plasma are not initialized, that is, the user didn't 
switch to each of them at some point before invoking meta+tab (and keeping 
meta pressed), plasmashell dead-locks for some reason. Which I haven't found 
the source yet.

So, from what I see here, there are two things needed to fix this.

1) Make opening the activity switcher fast. That would need to throw away the 
lazy loading that we currently have. And I'm not sure that would be a 
sufficient improvement.

2) Make it a part of kwin (apologies to M.G. for this one). It could use the 
same QML elements as the real activity switcher, but without the search bar 
and the stopped activities that need to go away for meta+tab in any case.
Advantages for this would be that kwin already has a global instance of 
KActivities::Consumer class, which means it keeps the cached list of 
activities - no need for anything to be loaded on meta+tab apart from the QML 
delegates.

Thoughts?


Cheerio,
Ivan


KDE, ivan.cukic at kde.org, http://ivan.fomentgroup.org/ 
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