Re: Usability feedback?

Hi there;

thanks a bunch for your feedback.

On 9/27/18 9:47 PM, Christoph Feck wrote:
> 
> this list is one way to discuss usability, but I am not sure if it is 
> actively monitored by other community members or even developers.
> 

Ok, so I'll possibly get started leaving a few thoughts here. After 
diving into KDE (again), I figured out that the community seems to be by 
far more fragmented than I hoped - forums? Mailing Lists? IRC? There 
seems no "one-stop first place to go" for getting started and in touch 
with people behind. But that's another thing I guess.

I've been into desktop Linux ever since the late 1990s exclusively, used 
KDE and GNOME ever since its early first beta releases, have been using 
GNOME a bit more than KDE ever since. Then and now, I always perceived 
KDE to be by far technically superiour while GNOME people are those to 
offer a better user experience. The last couple of weeks, I gave KDE 
Neon a try and figured out that things still are like that. I really 
would like to use KDE full-time on my production environment but there 
are too many (maybe small) things that just get into my way and are 
incredibly annoying. I'm on a laptop, working with multiple monitors as 
well as sometimes "just" with the rather small laptop display, and 
figured out that GNOME just gets less into my way. KDE is way more 
flexible and offers way more configuration options, but unfortunately it 
also takes a load more effort to get things set up right, and some 
things apparently (or should I say much to my surprise) can't be changed 
at all.

A few random findings:

(a) The whole "Activities" thing. Meanwhile I figured out what it does, 
but I don't need it, so I just want to easily (one-click?) disable it 
and make all of its UI and keybinding components go away - in a way so I 
can easily enable it again if I want to make use of it. Right now, at 
least there's always an activity-related control on my desktop that 
can't be removed. Maybe there is a way to achieve this but it seems to 
be hidden rather well.

(b) Clipboard and KDE vault integration in the taskbar, same: Meanwhile 
I know what they do, I don't want or need them, but there seems no 
"better" way getting rid of it than to uninstall certain packages (at 
least for vault this worked, still try to figure out the same for the 
clipboard management).

(c) Handling wallpapers. On GNOME, it's practically impossible to set a 
wallpaper for login or lock screen. On KDE, this is very well possible - 
but here, on the other side, it's extremely difficult to make sure one 
single wallpaper is applied to *all* desktops (on all display) and login 
and lock screen. Expectation would be something such as right-click 
image in file manager, choose "set wallpaper" and see just that happen - 
or maybe just "one" dialog where to force one wallpaper to be set to all 
desktops and screens explicitely. So far, I have at least three dialogs 
(SDDM, lock screen, desktop) for doing so, and this still leaves out 
wallpapers in example on displays that aren't connected at this time. 
That's strange.

(d) Search on desktop. On GNOME, the "straightforward" killer feature 
for me is dash: Press left-Meta, type some text and are quickly able to 
either launch an application or switch to an existing (running) process 
or choose an item found by desktop search. On KDE, I do have that 
"search" field in the KDE application launcher (taskbar icon, invoked by 
left-Meta) and the "plasma search" (invoked by ALT+SPACE on a default 
setup). Both behave different. And it seems impossible to, in example, 
make the search in the application launcher behave just like the plasma 
search so to get rid of one of them.

(e) Alternate application launcher that resembles GNOME dash: Good 
start, but unfortunately (unlike most of the rest of KDE) this is 
virtually not possible to set up for my tastes: Fonts are clumsy and way 
too large. There's way too much information on that screen. And also, in 
there, I can't in example "find" running instances of applications such 
as konsole or Firefox. No way to configure this.

(f) A load of applications, on KDE, seem very "dusted" compared to the 
GNOME equivalents. Starting, randomly, with kmail (vs. geary) or 
kagregator (vs. feedreader): The KDE variants, in both fields, are 
tremendously more powerful than the GNOME variants in virtually every 
field - except usability where they look and feel like fallen out of the 
late 1990s. :(

(g) Most disturbingly, kdeconnect: I use this excessively on GNOME 
(using gsconnect), and I was expecting this to be even more mature on 
KDE given it's the "original" implementation. But while in gsconnect 
there's a small window that allows for doing virtually everything with 
the phone (send SMS, browse files, send links, locate, ...), in 
kdeconnect task bar icon I have a large window with nothing in it - 
sending SMS apparently isn't even possible out of the box. This is a bit 
strange.


These are a few things I stumbled across while using KDE neon on my 
production laptop for roughly three weeks. I don't want to be negative 
and also don't want to complain; I still see KDE to be the technically 
better desktop and I'd like to help making things better, but I'm 
absolutely unsure where and how to start as there are way too many 
different points of entry. Actually, being a developer (though mostly 
Java/backend) myself, I'd even be able, taking some time, to work into 
things and work on code, but it's difficult to find the right place to 
get started in order to do the "right" things. Maybe this is off-topic 
on this list, but maybe it helps in some way, anyhow.

Thanks for reading and bye!

Kristian