On Thursday 22 July 2010 21:39:20 James Knott wrote:
Patrick Shanahan wrote:
* James Knott
[07-22-10 14:55]: How does one change the KDE4 desktop background to something that looks decent?
You *really* cannot find it?
<right-click> on the desktop and choose "Desktop Settings"
If you really dis-like KDE(4) so much, why do you continue to use it and to deride it. There are a lot of other desktops available. You might even grow to like gnome, iirc you used to talk the same way about it.
Curious it wasn't under Personal Settings (Configure Desktop) as in KDE 3.
I have used KDE for many years and it's a real shame what's happened to it. I've never cared for Gnome, as I found it was too "dumbed down" for my tastes. It appears KDE is following suit.
Back when KDE 3 ruled the world, the peanut gallery told us that Personal Settings (kcontrol) contained too many, badly organised settings, so for KDE 4 we moved some settings dialogs out of kcontrol and onto their actual workspace elements, principle of locality. In addition, Plasma Desktop allows you to have many elements (panels, wallpapers, widgets) in arbitrary, nested structures which would be hard to present to the user in a standalone config app in a way that they could understand what they are configuring. Access to settings from the element itself seemed more intuitive. Consider as an alternative a settings module containing a treeview of desktop elements, and a config pane for the currently selected element. The tree would be something like this for a default desktop (this is roughly the tree that plasma-desktop-appletsrc contains: Desktop1 /Background /Wallpaper /Mouse Actions /Panel 1 /Widget 1.1 /Widget 1.2 /... /Widget 1.10 (a system tray) /Widget 1.10.1 Desktop 2 /Background /Wallpaper (because everyone complained when wallpaper-per-desktop was unavailable until recently) ... You can't label those anonymous elements with widget names; most people confuse System Tray with Task Manager half the time, myself included. What you would end up doing to make this usable would be including a thumbnail of the desktop and highlighting the currently selected element, which is back to the locality principle. The third option would be to play to 'I don't need more than one panel containing a menu, a task manager, a pager, a system tray, a clock and a lock/logout button and a wallpaper that changes per virtual desktop just like in KDE 3 thank you very much' and provide a settings module that allows only those elements to be configured. While that would undoubtedly be mana from heaven to many KDE 4 critics, it is the "dumbed down" approach when compared to local settings and a separate treeview. I agree that moving configuration between versions is disruptive, but if you assume good faith towards our users, can you see that we were trying to design configuration that would accomodate the needs of basic users, power users and innovative workspace designs? Will -- Will Stephenson, openSUSE Team SUSE LINUX Products GmbH - Nürnberg - AG Nürnberg - HRB 16746 - GF: Markus Rex -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org