At 01:52:47 on Tuesday Tuesday 15 December 2009, Rodney Baker <rodney.baker@iinet.net.au> wrote:
On Tue, 15 Dec 2009 10:06:04 Stan Goodman wrote:
At 07:52:54 on Sunday Sunday 13 December 2009, Teruel de Campo MD
<chusty@attglobal.net> wrote:
If you click on the <device notifier> plasmoid you will see the usb stick. If you move the cursor to the righ side an upper arrow shows up. Click on it and the usb is umounted. If the device is a dvd, the dvd will be ejected.
-=terry=-
[...]
So I made a Device Notifier, thinking it would be on the panel. But instead, it is placed at an apparently random position on the desktop (not the Desktop Folder, of course. I can see that making a number of them could be used to produce a satisfying mess on the screen. It has two levels of useful commands, but it isn't clear why those are listed under "Plain Desktop", since no other kind of desktop is mentioned. Then I discovered (I don't know how) that the Device Notifier can be attached to the "Desktop Folder". [...]
When you have the "add widgets" window open, drag the device notifier widget to the panel instead of just clicking on it. The default action might be to add it to the desktop (or a desktop folder) but you can drag and drop it to wherever you want (including to the panel).
Is this intuitive? Is there any hint that this is what one is intended to do? Or is one expected to get psychic messages from the KDE team?
Whilst you're at it, why not add a system tray widget to the panel as well - that works pretty much like the system tray in KDE3/WinXP, even hiding inactive icons for you if you so desire.
Oh, you can also have a quick launch area as well, for thos apps that you use often (again, drag and drop apps from the menu or the desktop folder).
You can make KDE4 work pretty much exactly how you want it; it's just that the semantics of how you achieve that is different from KDE3 (which necessarily flows from changing the toolkit used to build it from Qt3 to Qt4). Remember, KDE4 is a rewrite from scratch, not a development of KDE3. It is, in effect, a completely new desktop.
If you tell me this, I have to believe it. But, as others have said, this is a brand new desktop, not a development of KDE3, and is very different from anything that I know; I am far from convinced that these differences would be significant for me, or that they would contribute to the UTILITY that I would derive from openSuSE. I was told yesterday that the very different structure was forced upon KDE because the programming framework is different; why was it necessary to employ a framework that implied a fundamental change and otherwise unnecessary load of inconvenience on users? Does anybody at KDE even think about users? Did KDE think to poll users to learn if they thought KDE was needful of a fundamental overhaul? Why not? I am not able or prepared to devote a lot of (unnecessary) time to learning its ins and outs, making mistakes and puzzling out why they happened, when I had a perfectly adequate desktop that took me quite a lot of time to learn. I do, after all, have a lot to do just to survive and deal with life. I do not know how others manage the enormous demands on their time for the learning curve. I can't manage it, and I resent having the necessity forced upon me in a dictatorial fashion. -- Stan Goodman Qiryat Tiv'on Israel -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org