Boom, I changed my Refresh rate to 50hz just by scrolling the display setting page. (and I didn’t even scroll from the dropdown control, the page actually moved.) Just need to hit “Apply” and I’m good to go!
If you’re scrolling a kde app and pass by any kind of dropdown, list, tab etc. the scroll action can very easily be passed down to the control, changing its value.
In addition to being an unintended sideffect of simply scrolling a page, this behavior can easily cause accidental changes to settings. I’ve had this happen to me on many times. Given how ginormous KDE settings are it’s all too easy to scroll past a random control and do something you never intended.
If somebody wants to change the value of a dropdown, they should click on it and select the value they want. I doubt anyone intentionally changes dropdown values by scrolling - and if they do they shouldn’t.
I would disable scrolling input entirely for the following controls: tabs, dropdowns, spinboxes, sliders and addressbars (see dolphin). I would certainly disable it for any controls are located in scrolling views. I know some browsers have scrolling behavior for tabs, which is also a bad idea, but at least they have a well defined tab area. QT apps can have tabs all over the place, including in scrolling views and the risk of changing tabs by accident is that much greater.
With regard to this, Gnome’s UX is instructive and a model to follow: scrolling is only used for the occasional volume or other dial and of course for actual scrolling, without any random sideffects.
NB: (I’ll be using the#uxquirktag to here document some UX/UI issues on KDE/QT that seem like deviations from “best practices” as seen on other platforms. )
@ngraham I’ve got a bunch more of these KDE-specific quirks but it seems almost too many to list and probably too many to ever really fix, not without having a design guy whose full time job it is to iron these things out in accordance with “best practices,” and ultimately outline a comprehensive redesign where such issues do not arise, rather than dealing with everything on an ad hock basis.
Most of these quirks aren’t actually design issues but rather technical ones. For example the scrollable control thing is tracked by https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=399324.
Nobody has figured out how to make that happen yet.
Why don’t we take the easy step and just disable switch-on-hover? Because it’s actually an important interaction method used by many people; probably tens of thousands, maybe millions.
You wrote:
I doubt anyone intentionally changes dropdown values by scrolling - and if they do they shouldn’t.
That’s not the kind of thinking you can engage in when you’re considering the entire package and the whole userbase. If we just remove things that are blocking our ability to implement stuff we do want to change, eventually we’ll end up with almost nothing, annoy our core user base, lose our differentiation from GNOME, and then die because GNOME does being GNOME better than we ever would.
Some might say “okay, then just add a setting for this” but that doesn’t help either because defaults matter. Most people never change most settings, so what we choose as the default value would be the most important thing. “On by default” and we haven’t actually fixed anything; “off by default” and we still annoy the people using this, just not quite as much as if there was no way to get it back. And in the process we clutter up some settings UI somewhere and make the UX feel more “overwhelming.”
What we want here is that scrolling on controls still changes them
If this is the crux of the problem then it’s little wonder there’s no fix 7 years in. There is no fix because there’s no doing both. You either keep things the way they are with random values getting changed by scrolling or you block scrolling interaction where it’s not needed - Scrolling is generally used for zoom, volume and scrolling. If we can get rid of it in most other places without jeopardizing the stuff it’s actually needed for, then I think we should.
Do we really want scrolling on a combo boxes specifically to change their value? I certainly don’t and it’s not a “feature” on most other toolkits. I am not sure if anybody uses this, never mind millions. If anyone does use it that way - they shouldn’t: there’s a reliable way of changing the value of a combobox by keyboard or by clicking.
So assuming there is a way to turn this feature off specifically for combo boxes, the hurdle here would appear to be feature hoarding: we keep “features” just because they’re already there. As long as this is the approach, the source of broken behavior can never be resolved only papered over with additional “features” which in turn introduce new problems, and so on - it never ends.
We won’t get very far with an attitude of “my usage of the system is the only normal and acceptable one.”
Engineering is about trade-offs. If we can’t even acknowledge there is a trade-off, then we’ll end up talking past one another and wasting each other’s time.
It’s not just my opinion if virtually every other toolkit besides QT agrees with me that it’s an anti-feature, and if in my usage all it demostrably does is cause accidental changes to settings. How do you even change the value reliably with a touchpad or freewheel scrolling if you wanted to? You’re liable to overshoot or undershoot most of the time.
This is why it’s important to understand how and why other platforms do things the way they do. Imagine if the dropdowns in the VSCode settings page had this kind of behavior? It’s absurd. Don’t take my word for it, actually look at how other people do things, none of the UX issues with KDE are some kind of uncharted territory.
I will add that this quirk is part of a more general “precise mousing” problem that KDE encumbers its users with. The fact that you have to aim the mouse in order to scroll a page is just the worst symptom of this general disease. If you look at gnome, they actually studied this stuff so there’s no careful mousing required. Every mouse target is big, obvious and intuitive. “Power users” don’t care course because they take pride in knowing precisely where every little thing is and love to challenge their mousing skills, but for everyone it leads to annoyance.
What’s the verdict here @ngraham ? Seems like this issue is fixable if KDE just does what literally every other platform does. One could make a toggle to enable “change random settings by scrolling” behavior in breeze settings for backward compatibility. If nobody end up using it it, the setting can be removed.
Who care about me or my tone lol? I’m nobody and my tone is normal for online forums. Consider the substance, it’s the end result that matters. Is my tone more important than your project?
I think, many on here appreciate feedback and are willing to discuss it, so long it is constructive.
What you are doing is spamming the forum, replying to yourself over and over and as of lately, you’re also insulting the very people you want to listen to you.
Why don’t you allocate this energy into something helpful?
If the design is so outdated and bad, come up with a solution instead! You don’t have to be a programmer to help. You can also simply suggest an improved design.
Also, please, stop comparing KDE to GNOME. If GNOME is so much better, you maybe should just use GNOME. That’s the beauty of using Linux: The choice is yours.
It’s time to level up if you want to be taken seriously rather than arguing about tone.
Humans aren’t robots; how you communicate is usually more important than the actual content, when it comes to people being willing to listen to and consider that content.
If you’re willing to learn and grow and use a constructive tone, you’ll get better reactions and more consideration of your ideas.
If not, I suspect it’s only a matter of time before one of the moderators takes action.
I’ve explicitly proposed solutions - its stuff that everyone else already figured decades ago. All I get in return is denial, stonewalling and straightforward, repeated personal insults - while simultaneously whining about “tone” - because any direct, constructive criticism is seen an affront. You write “Dear so and so” here while another thread you express agreement with that “BANk the troll smam!” moron whose account is less than a month old.
I’ll won’t go into the theory of mind that makes you guys behave this way but clearly any further engagement on my part is complete waste of time. I’m out.
So, sue me but please also show me where you explicitly proposed a solution. To me, this just feels like you’re looking for attention and controversy. And that is - by definition - what a troll does.
!