Re: [opensuse-kde] We want to hear from YOU
On 08/03/14 09:01, Raymond Wooninck wrote:
Dear fellow KDE Desktop user, We want to hear from you about your experience with the KDE Desktop within openSUSE and where we could improve. Click on the link below and give us your feedback. Every opinion counts. http://eSurv.org?s=OBNLNJ_9747839c We wil...
Well I tried. But I got an Internal 500 Server Error or some such annoyance at the end. I had already anticipated such a circumstance - these survey backends are always horseshit and let me down at the last moment. It's why I have a routine of Ctrl-A Ctrl-C built in to my brain when filling out any form text field. So perhaps the reason it failed was because when I got to the last question 13 I thought yay, an opportunity to spout off directly to some developers, let me grab a beer. And away I went, typing to my heart's content. About half an hour later I thought 'this will fail when I hit submit, either because I've taken too long or because I've typed too much.' So here were my remarks in response to the open-ended question 13. I don't care if the world at large gets to read them. (Since I'm not subscribed to this list and just read it via RSS I will probably not be able to reply in any useful threaded way in case anyone responds here). ---- 13. In your opinion where could the openSUSE KDE Community team improve? ---- The current openSUSE dark KDE themes are unusable, resulting in various places where text or other elements are unreadable against the background. I have quickly modified the popular Obsidian Coast theme with a few more SUSE-like greens and that works much better (aside from this very box I'm typing in now which has an awful default contrast for some reason - must be pulling in some colour elements from the page design; yellow on white, urgh). The standard KDE setup in openSUSE could be improved. Many things are a matter of taste but some stuff is just poor attention to detail. The default taskbar at the bottom of the screen is not high enough, resulting in some squashed elements, and certain systray hover popups appear at the top-right of the screen instead of the bottom-right (at least on my 1280x800 resolution). I find a minimum height of 32 pixels suffices for the panel. Some elements don't work with a vertical panel, others like plasmoids have weird button borders that don't fit the buttons, or the KRunner dropdown suggestions when typing are too small and cut off, perhaps because I've increased the default font size. The default KDE fonts are horrid and not big enough. I prefer 9pt across the board with 10pt bold in the window titles, but admittedly I install the MS fonts since I never liked DejaVu, Bitstream Vera or any other alternatives. The boot, login and default backgrounds were disappointingly not changed in the last release, which is not to say that they were bad but it's the first time I ever recall there being no visual refresh from one oS distro update to another. However, I'm not keen on how previous editions from the 9.x series onwards used constantly differing shades of green (and don't even mention the heretic blue that briefly appeared). There was talk years ago of scrapping the initial KDE welcome splash screen and/or updating it with something else, but we're still stuck with it. I don't know why it would be so difficult to create some local HTML page that opens in a browser. The additional elements could be contained as hidden files in the users' .kde4 directories with the main .html file sitting on the desktop (or the page elements could be in /Desktop/.kde_greeter). That way people can still make use of it if offline, and link to installed help files and documentation. openSUSE could make more of an effort to distinguish its KDE desktop, unless it really wants to just go with raw upstream defaults. Nothing elaborate, but how about some more obvious default Activities, with buttons or links provided somewhere so people actually try them out instead of having to actively go looking for them? How about an implementation of KMix that isn't abjectly horrible? That is to say, with PulseAudio enabled, one that doesn't resize the main mixer window after every subsequent opening such that none of the controls are visible. And by the way, that question about KCM Touchpad vs Synaptiks. I don't even know what I'm using any more. In my previous 12.3 installation they seemed to both be installed and conflicting, and I eventually had to manually remove Synaptiks from the loaded services then delete it entirely. But at the same time, a couple of nice bits of configuration functionality seem to have vanished, like the ephemeral option to prefer short touchpad taps to long ones, where did that go? Finally, not KDE-specific, but will whoever kept parroting the notion that every successive version of openSUSE provided a more flicker-free boot please shut up? It is absolutely not true, in fact on all my machines the boot provides more buggering about now than it ever did even nine years ago. It's just a blatant lie to say that plymouth and all the rest has made the boot process smooth and flicker free. It's all over the place. I keep seriously thinking about uninstalling all that stuff and just watching a lot of incoherent text scroll up the screen like the good (bad) old days. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kde+owner@opensuse.org
On 2014-03-11 00:58 (GMT+0100) Peter composed:
The current openSUSE dark KDE themes are unusable, resulting in various places where text or other elements are unreadable against the background. I have quickly modified the popular Obsidian Coast theme with a few more SUSE-like greens and that works much better (aside from this very box I'm typing in now which has an awful default contrast for some reason - must be pulling in some colour elements from the page design; yellow on white, urgh).
The icky openSUSE green choices several years ago convinced me to stick with upstream themes for KDE and KDM. I think the only time I saw any SUSE theme use a dominating green I could appreciate was 8.0 or 8.1. For Gfxboot I always set penguin=100 to see some attractive colors at boot time.
The standard KDE setup in openSUSE could be improved. Many things are a matter of taste but some stuff is just poor attention to detail. The default taskbar at the bottom of the screen is not high enough, resulting in some squashed elements, and certain systray hover popups appear at the top-right of the screen instead of the bottom-right (at least on my 1280x800 resolution). I find a minimum height of 32 pixels suffices for the panel. Some elements don't work with a vertical panel, others like plasmoids have weird button borders that don't fit the buttons, or the KRunner dropdown suggestions when typing are too small and cut off, perhaps because I've increased the default font size. The default KDE fonts are horrid and not big enough. I prefer 9pt across the board with 10pt bold in the window titles, but admittedly I install the MS fonts since I never liked DejaVu, Bitstream Vera or any other alternatives.
It sounds to me like your size complaints are at least in substantial part a result of applied DPI in excess of physical display density. X by default, which KDE accepts by default, a DPI of 96, regardless what actual screen density is. "9pt" is the nominal default font size in KDE even upstream, but if your screen DPI is actually 133, that 9pt shrinks to a physical 6.5pt. One of openSUSE's discarded past advantages was that when I first started using it it defaulted to 10pt rather than 9pt, one important customization I once upon a time had no need to make. However, adjusting DPI will usually not much if at all affect the size of icons on the panel, nor make the panel taller. Maybe screen density is something QT5 and/or KDE5 will address.
Finally, not KDE-specific, but will whoever kept parroting the notion that every successive version of openSUSE provided a more flicker-free boot please shut up? It is absolutely not true, in fact on all my machines the boot provides more buggering about now than it ever did even nine years ago. It's just a blatant lie to say that plymouth and all the rest has made the boot process smooth and flicker free. It's all over the place. I keep seriously thinking about uninstalling all that stuff and just watching a lot of incoherent text scroll up the screen like the good (bad) old days.
I taboo Plymouth at installation time, and put splash=verbose in all cmdline stanzas. I like watching that text confirm something is happening while waiting for a login prompt to appear. Wondering what's happening behind the curtain is one of the things that kept me from ever replacing OS/2 with Windows. I certainly don't need similar secrecy from Linux. -- "The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation) Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks! Felix Miata *** http://fm.no-ip.com/ -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-kde+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-kde+owner@opensuse.org
participants (2)
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Felix Miata
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Peter