Inconsistency between switches

Help
1

Plasma 6 has switched to using switches instead of checkboxes in the plasma theme. On a default installation of the Fedora KDE spin, there are 6 switches:

  • Network applet: 1 for Wi-fi and 1 for airplane mode
  • Brightness & color applet: 1 for night light
  • Power & battery applet: 1 for manually block sleep and screen locking
  • Audio volume applet: 1 for raise maximum volume
  • Bluetooth applet: 1 for enable bluetooth

When the last 3 switches are activated, there is a blue circle around the handle of the switch. This is different from the first 3 switches which do not show this circle. Why is this different?

2

It’s a focus indicator, showing you what currently has focus. So if you see it, it means that’s the widget with keyboard focus.

For me all of them show the colored circle when interacted with, as they’ve just gained focus

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3

relatively OT but I didn’t like the change to switches, it’s a Desktop, desktop uses checkboxes :disappointed:

4

We use switches for things that take effect immediately, to make it clearer to the user (once they figure out this pattern) what will happen.

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5

Thank you. On another note, the last 3 switches are triggered by pressing space, while the first 3 aren’t. Why is this behavior different? Shouldn’t all switches have keyboard focus when I click on the respective plasmoid?

6

Clicking on a switch triggers the execution immediately, but ticking a checkbox changes only its visual appearance and the execution can be triggered via another control like Apply/Cancel buttons.

You can trigger immediate execution for a checkbox. But a switch is preferred for this use case.