Behaviour of "Show Desktop"

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

Hi everyone,
I must admit that I totally underestimated the complexity of this whole issue. 
It's so crazy, just reading this thread made my head spin.

This situation is also an excellent example of where design "in a vacuum" 
(i.e. without any user research) shows its limits. Apparently, different users 
use Show Desktop and/or Dashboard in very different ways and for very 
different purposes. Without having any information about which types of (and 
how many) users use it in which way, we're jumping from bug report to bug 
report, trying to satisfy everyone, which is simply not possible.

I've read the whole thread, but I decided to not quote any of the other emails 
for the sake of readability.

I agree that hiding the panel in this mode seems to have introduced more 
problems than it solved, so I agree that this should be changed back. However, 
what we have to avoid at all cost is the situation where users click on a task 
in the taskbar but the window stays invisible (hiding the panel avoided this, 
but, in retrospect, at a too high cost).

Therefore, two possible things that could happen is that either only this 
specific window is shown, or the mode is broken and all previously shown 
windows return. Both variants have their set of advantages and disadvantages, 
and regardless of what we choose, we'll get bug reports from users to whose 
typical use of the feature this behavior does not fit. That seems unavoidable.

If it does minimize all windows, then it should really do that, just as if one 
would manually click "Minimize" on every single window. That also means that 
they the windows could not be all brought back at once, but only one by one. 
Anything else has a high potential of leading to a not clearly defined state 
(e.g. what happens if I minimize all, then click a window in the taskbar, 
minimize that again, and then "un-minimize").
That would probably introduce the fewest problems, but would also be hardly 
useful for just quickly interacting with the desktop and then continuing work 
as before.

Un-hiding all windows as soon as the user clicks on a task in the taskbar or 
starts a new application would satisfy the "quick peek" usecase best, but 
would also mean that users could not use this effect as a means to "clean up 
their workspace". I do agree with Thomas, however, that this is not what "Show 
Desktop" is meant for anyway, and virtual desktops are indeed the better means 
for this.

Having a separate Plasmoid plus keyboard shortcut to do an actual "minimize 
all" for cleaning up the workspace without switching to a different VD (as 
sebas proposed if I understood correctly) as an alternative for those who want 
that does sound like a great idea to me.

So, to summarize, from my perspective, the way to enrage as few users as 
possible would be to
- Make Show Desktop hide all windows but break whenever a window that doesn't 
directly belong to the shell or a Plasmoid is created/manually shown, and keep 
the panel visible
- Provide an additional shortcut plus Plasmoid to minimize all windows, which 
really does that (no special stuff here).

When in doubt, we should prefer clearly defined behavior (even if some users 
don't like that behavior) to unpredictable behavior that may leave users 
confused. If someone writes a bug report because he or she simply does not 
like a behavior, we can always say "Well, but that is how it was intended, 
sorry, deal with it". If a user files a bug because they don't understand what 
their system is doing anymore, it is a valid usability bug.

That is my position. I have no idea about any technical problems any of this 
may introduce, so of course you guys have the final word on it. If you decide 
the safer way is to roll back to whichever working state until we've ironed 
out issues with the new behavior, then I won't protest. While the situation up 
until 5.2 definitely was not perfect, it's better than a broken state. If 
fixing any actual bugs in the 5.3 implementation and not hiding the panel is 
the preferred solution form a technical perspective as well, all the better.

I hope I haven't confused everyone more than we already are.
Best,
Thomas