What fits for all is what you guys have been repeated bludgeoned with and that is tell peeps in a pop up about the changes even with images if necessary and make them acknowledge the changes before they can close the pop up. Peep keep tell you guys do not switch to the new way without permission. Give an option to do it ourselves if we want it.
As referenced above, thereās a broader principle of design changes and new features being on-by-default. Changing that approach seems like a more fundamental debate about the philosophy of KDE projects.
Personally, I would anticipate a larger uproar if folks were forced to interact with popups every time a new feature or design change was introduced. I know Iām personally frustrated on the Windows PC I use for work that Edge routinely opens and focuses a new tab to tell me about all the āAI-powered featuresā theyāve introduced.
Back on-topic, @akselmo Iād actually guess that while desktop screen sizes are increasing, many folks are compensating by cranking up screen-scaling - just based on the number of posts about issues related to higher scaling levels - and that laptop screen sizes kind of have a practical limit. So, I think that a status bar with useful content would likely be visible for most 
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My two cents, but I do enjoy these types of new-tab changelog digests, like you see in browsers and code editors. The option to perma-disable them are paramount though.
Major Plasma updates use a large pop-up that I personally leave enabled because I like seeing it, but Frameworks and KDE Apps donāt use one, and itās not necessarily the solution for individual apps and framework changes that are supposed to transparently take place behind the scenes.
Syncing up the Frameworks release schedule for UI/functional and bugfix changes with the major/minor Plasma updates would make sense, but IIRC thereās several reasons the framework and app releases are separate.
My guess is that less issues exist when scaling is not applied.
Off-topic to Dolphin specifically, but I can say as a user of 27" 1440p monitors, and a 14" 1200p laptop, I disable or invert display scaling wherever itās present, on any device. Otherwise everything is too big, thereās accessibility value in globally increased fonts and padding, but I value information density far more.
I just ran out of disk space on one of my internal storage drives (for video projects) and needed to move some large files to a NAS to free up space.
- I needed to see how much space Iād freed up on the internal drive (knowing roughly how much Iād need to re-attempt the transcoding operation that just failed), but because of this change, I now only had the visual bar in the Places sidebar, which required me to waste seconds hovering over it and waiting for the tooltip to pop up in order to check how much space Iād freed up.
- Additionally, the sidebar took several seconds to update each time I moved a file, whereas Iām used to just refreshing the folder view with F5 to get the bottom panelās indicator to update.
- The NAS isnāt mounted in such a way that it shows up as a device in the Devices section of the Places sidebar, so I now had no visual indication of how much I was filling up the NAS as I was moving those large files onto it.
- This is when I said āthis isnāt going to workā and looked up how to change the setting (because I couldnāt find it in the settings myself-- I was first looking around in the Panels submenu, then Configure Toolbars, and even when I went to Configure Dolphin third, āStatus & Location Barsā didnāt jump out at me).
The 25 pixels or so of vertical space (not even enough to fit another row of content at most zoom levels) is not worth losing the information displayed on the bar (including also the file/folder count), certainly on my normal 4K display, but not even on my smaller 1080p displays, either. That was my reason for reverting the setting change.
Itās actually a little disappointing to hear that this change was made ājust becauseā without a strong opinion even from the person who did it. On the other hand, itās a bit of a relief to know the feature doesnāt have design team members actively against it and working to remove it altogether.
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its just nice being able to see how much space i have available at all times especially when working with large files, and having the zoom bar there is also really handy at times depending on the kind of media iām dealing with
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i should add this to my previous point too, i canāt see how much space is available on my smb shares without the status bar as i navigate to them via a shortcut that goes to smb://address/sharename instead of being mounted in fstab
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Personally, because Iām frequently working with a near-full partition (~10GB free) and large video files. But I donāt mind as long as thereās an option for the full bar.
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Itās because of how KDE saves config. It doesnāt explicitly save the default option. E.g., if you choose the āBreeze Darkā theme, youāll have a āTheme=Breeze Darkā line in your config files. But if you choose the default āBreezeā theme, there wonāt be any āTheme=ā line at all. So if later some dev changes the default to āOxygenā in code, your theme would be automatically changed to that.
We canāt tell if the user is just fine with whatever default KDE devs set, or he explicitly wants this specific option, which happens to be the default at the moment. So I donāt think thereās a perfect solution here.
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KDE upgrades only 2 or 3 times a year, so thatās much less frequently than Edge, and probably wonāt annoy users.
And similar to Edge, for most users, itās just part of a routine system upgrade, so they might not notice that itās upgraded, and might think itās broken. Maybe not for every new features, but users should be informed for these āwhy itās suddenly brokenā changes.
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Hey, all!!
Stumbled upon this thread through a search, made this account to offer my specific gripe with this change, as well as my 2 cents on how it could be improved.
So, Iām also one of those people (musician, photographer etc) who regularly works with massive files and appreciates being able to check how much remaining storage Iām working with. However, I also appreciate minimalist GUI layouts and try to hide as many menus and toolbars as possible. As such, I created a keyboard shortcut and added the āshow / hide statusbarā icon to the toolbar, so I could quickly check and then return to what I was doing.
With this latest update, that option doesnāt exist anymore. Instead, I have to CTL+M to show the menu I keep hidden, then Settings > Configure Dolphin > [Statusbar Tab] > Disable / Enableā¦. any time I want to check, then repeat this process to hide it again in order to return to minimalist bliss.
I donāt know what the future holds for this GUI change, but I want to say that I do very much appreciate being able to hide the āzoomā slider as a separate option. Thatās awesome. But I really, really miss being able to quickly and easily show / hide the status bar. Is there a chance that could be brought back?
Hereās what Iād propose: keep the settings menu the same. Iām sure folks would like to decide whether they want to see the āfullā status bar, or the new āminiā variant and tinkerers will find this setting themselves. BUT - create separate toggles to show / hide the status bar and the zoom that users can create a keyboard shortcut for and / or add to the toolbar, if they so wish.
How does that all sound?
Thanks for your work, by the way!!
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