RW posted on Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:53:22 +0000 as excerpted:
> I presume by that you mean widgets. Personally I think they're an
> intrinsically bad idea that typifies what's wrong with KDE4. They look
> great in screen-shots and youtube, but it astonishes me that anyone
> wants active desktop components underneath application windows.
I used to think pretty much like you -- part of the reason I never had
many icons on my desktop, too. And I still don't have what people would
call a "cluttered" desktop. But I have, with some time and some use (and
after that qt repainting bug that slowed plasma down so bad, especially
on certain hardware, pre-4.3.1, was fixed), and I now find a select few
desktop widgets actually quite useful.
One very major factor that makes a difference, however, is window
transparency.
While I have a relatively large always-on-top panel running across the
top of my (dual 1920x1200 stacked for 1920x2400) screen, carrying mostly
performance monitor plasmoids (a total of nine yasp-scripted plasmoids to
be exact, from kde-look, since "the application formerly known as
ksysguard" is so buggy still, and has yet to get a plasmoid version of it
to replace the kicker applet that worked so well for me in kde3), and I
have a small autohide panel at the bottom left with kickoff, device-
notifier, a classic menu set to display the systemsettings and bookmarks
menu, and a quick-access browser plasmoid (improved folderview panel/menu
implementation, also kde-look), I realized that there's a place for other
information, that doesn't need to /always/ be displayed, but which is
nice to have immediately available, as well. Thus I run yawp (yet
another weather plasmoid, in Gentoo but I'm not sure if it's a kde sc
default or from kde-look) directly on the desktop. It's nice having the
weather available, either directly, when nothing's covering it (a luxury
only really possible on large desktops such as mine, I realize, it's on
the "aux/overflow" monitor, at the top directly under the performance
monitor panel, so it's not covered unless I have auxiliary windows open,
perhaps a konsole doing system updates while I read the list maximized in
the bottom monitor, a browser window looking at references while I
compose a reply, whatever), or displayed as window background when
something is.
I also run the comic-strip plasmoid on my desktop, this one on the main
monitor, so covered much more often, but it's nice to glimpse thru the
window transparency that the strip has changed, therefore giving me an
excuse to take a short break and switch to a different desktop, without
windows covering the strip, to read it.
Neither of these is critical enough to put on the always-on-top panel.
They're too big to fit on the rather small auto-hide launcher panel at
the bottom-left, and if I put them on another panel, they'd irritatingly
popup when I happened to bump my mouse on that edge/corner (the reason I
keep the auto-hide launcher panel so small, so it doesn't usually popup
at the wrong time, and if it does, it's small enough that it's unlikely
to cover anything I'm trying to work on).
IOW, the desktop is the perfect place for such relatively low priority
but still useful and interesting widgets to be located. On the desktop,
they don't get in my way when I'm trying to do something, but they're
still convenient when I want to glance at them, switching to a different
desktop if necessary to do so.
Basically, they've grown on me, and now that I've used them for a couple
months, I'd really hate to lose them, or the ability to put them on my
desktop where they're convenient, but not in the way. =:^)
Really, it's about the same process that has me using icecat (generic
firefox) instead of konqueror, more and more frequently, as well. I'm
beginning to find it difficult to do without my personally customized set
of extensions, especially when I come across a page that needs javascript
turned on for more than that single page, and there's no way to tell in
konqueror what else to decide whether the risk of allowing is worth the
potential reward of viewing the page, but icecat's noscript helpfully
lists the domains the page wants to run scripts from, and if there's any
question, JSView's there to open individual scripts for examination
before allowing them to run. DownloadHelper's pretty sweet, too,
considering I don't have flash installed, so DownloadHelper's what I use
to grab youtube vids to play in smplayer. Konqueror doesn't have such
things and is unlikely to ever have them, because its userbase is simply
too small to support the variety of extensions available for icecat/
firefox, even if the api to create them is duly exposed by the konq devs
(which I believe it is). Maybe if konq switches to webkit, and all the
webkit based browsers agree on a common extension framework, but even
then, icecat/firefox has a huge headstart, so it's unlikely. I expect
the same phenomenon to develop around plasma and plasmoids as time goes
on, and actually, if you take a look at kde-look, it's already
happening. But the thing is, those sorts of things tend to grow on you.
It's not like I all of a sudden found my own personal killer extension/
plasmoid, they grew on me, gradually changing my mind and personal
preferences as they did so.
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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