I’m running Kubuntu 25.10, KDE Frameworks 6.17.0, KDE Plasma 6.4.5
The system came with an annoying behaviour probably intended to be useful.
Sometimes, when I jostle my physical desk, or just my mouse, all my windows disappear, and I’m placed into a state probably intended to allow me to select among workspaces (virtual desktops). Fortunately, clicking on the blank space where my windows used to be takes me back to what I was doing.
I have not been able to figure how to get into this mode intentionally.
There are other ways to move to a new workspace. I have a tool near the left side of my panel which lets me click on the desired workspace, by position. It’s not optimal - selecting by name would be nice - but it’s better than any method which I can only enable randomly.
I’d like to disable this behaviour entirely.
Possibly knowing what it’s called would help me find a control for it. But I’d be happy enough just learning how to turn it off.
I’ve poked around in System Settings but found nothing that seemed related.
I am unsure if I understand what you are talking about. I can think of something similar but for sure not something which you can “click the empty space” to get back to normal.
Plasma has a few of these “Overview”, “Grid”, or “Peek” features. Most of them you can find in the settings under “Window Management”. As to how it might get activated without you knowing how, have a look at the settings in “Display & Monitor” > “Screen Edges”:
Mine is configured like this which means that other than the top right, all the corners are configured to do something:
That makes sense. I’d concluded it involved mouse movement and the edge of my screen, but when I tried that intentionally it was a no-op. I didn’t think of corners.
My version of System Settings only has 2 options in Display & Monitor - “Display configuration” and “night light”.
But searching for “edge” led me to Mouse & Touchpad, which has a screen edges sub-menu, and Touchscreen, where search thinks its “touchscreen gestures” sub-menu is relevant.
Unfortunately while the former gave me an option to disable windows going full screen when I drag them too near the top (yay!), what it offers involving corners mostly involves an image, which I’d presumed wasn’t intended to convey any meaning, since none was evident to me.
Haha! clicking on parts of that image brings up a menu.
Whoever designed this grew up with a cell phone as their primary computer.
Unfortunately I did not. I tend to look for text, and a tiny number of well know icons, and if I see none of them, conclude there’s no UI element present, or at least that if there is one (unfamiliar icon) it’s not the one I’m looking for.
But when I systematically clicked each square thing on that image of a monitor, they were all set to “no action”.
Disabling the things I found on that screen didn’t fix the problem. It just happened again, this time with the mouse in my hand. I may have shook it a bit in a fit of bad temper.
yeah, that’s what I meant with “click the buttons”
A click isn’t required, no. It needs a bit of velocity to kind of “really move into the corner” to trigger it. It’s pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it. But this doesn’t help us here. I can see none of your edges are enabled.
hmm.. can you take a screenshot or maybe snap your screen with your phone when it happens?
settings > virtual desktops i think is where you wan to be looking
if you just only ever use the two screens you have for your desktop then you can just delete all of them using the trash can icons.
the default panel where the system tray is located has a widget called pager that lets you switch between these desktops and it also has settings you may want to look at or simply remove the widget from the panel, if you don’t need it.
True, but that doesn’t explain their experience.. To me, it sounds like that new macOS feature where you click the desktop to move all windows outside the screen edges. Once in that mode, when you click the desktop again, the windows all get restored.
But I think that isn’t something my vanilla Plasma has. Maybe your distro comes with an add-on for some macOS features?
there is also a setting under screen edges where it will snap to the next virtual destkop if your mouse touches the edge of the screen, you might want to turn that off it is getting into your workflow.
Getting closer. I get this effect, or perhaps one of a family, when I put my mouse pointer in the upper left corner of my left hand monitor (not the right one) and push it towards/into the corner.
I don’t get it when I do the same with the upper right corner of the right hand monitor.
I snapped a picture with my phone, which I will attach.
My apologies for its orientation; I haven’t looked at image manipulation tools on linux yet, and have no idea how to rotate it before posting.
I could have sworn I’d checked all eight little boxes on the “Screen edges” screen, but when I looked just now, upper left was indeed set to Overview. I fixed that, and that also changed the appearance of the screen - there’s a blue box around any of them not set to “no Action”.
Back in the day - compiz I think - it was ‘Hot Corners’, and in my menu, ‘corners’ works best to get it right to the top whilslt ‘Screen’ puts it a fair way down the list.
I liked this feature - but sometimes (when playing ‘beyond all reason’ for example) it’s a pain in the bum…
So I re-assigned my hot corner actions to thumb mouse buttons…
So ‘fwd’ button now ‘present windows’ and ‘back’ button is now ‘cycle GRID>Overview>Desktop’.
whilslt ‘Screen’ puts it a fair way down the list.