Hi guys,
Recently switched to Fedora KDE 42 from Mint Cinnamon 22. It’s not technically my first time with KDE, as I have used it with Neon in the past for a year or so. It was at least a few years ago. Having switched to KDE after so long, KDE certainly felt a lot polished. Don’t get me wrong, Mint Cinnamon is great as well and rarely ever disappoints, but KDE certainly feels like a blast. KDE seems far more detail oriented with attention to the minute details. Things like ‘Trackpad Off on Mouse Connection’, and a ready to use setting to set NumLock on/off on startup (would be even cooler if it detected the keyboard layout, and if a separate NumPad is there then automatically set the NumLock On on startup. Not sure if it already does though). These little things really make a difference.
It hasn’t really been a lot of time, but while being at it, I thought why not share the initial experience and the minor inconveniences with the community. These are just the minor things I noticed that could make life a bit easier. Also, for ref, I have updated to Plasma 6.4.4, and I haven’t messed with any settings other than stated below (not even animations). I am not really sure if all the things I noticed relate to Plasma (very likely they don’t), but nevertheless putting things here for ref. So, here goes:
1 . Battery Threshold Persistence:
My laptop supports setting the max charge threshold at which battery stops charging. I saw the option for this in System Settings > Power Management > Advanced Power Settings. It allows to set a Charge Limit and allows to stop charging at the value the user specifies (usually 80). It works. But when the user reboots, it resets to 100 again, and doesn’t persist. My workaround was to create a script as below:
#!/bin/bash
echo 80 | sudo tee /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_control_end_threshold > /dev/null
and add the script to ~/.bash-profile and allow to execute the script without sudo by editing the sudoers with visudo. This setting is something that I expected to be persisted across boots OOTB.
2 . Trackpad scroll direction not applied to Volume and Brightness applet:
Very very minor thingy. When you set the trackpad scroll direction [check or uncheck the Invert scroll direction (Natural scrolling)] in System Settings > Mouse and Touchpad, the same scroll direction doesn’t apply to the Volume and Brightness applets. This isn’t really any inconvenience per se, imo. Just an inconsistency (or may honestly be by design).
3 . System Settings > Multimedia (Horizontal Scroll):
Again, not an inconvenience. Just something I noticed out of habit. At System Settings > Multimedia, when the window is not in maximized state (and a width just below a certain point), you get a horizontal scrollbar for the General tab even though the contents of the window fit perfectly. The contents of the Name tab do not fit the window though. So it may be that the window dimensions specified are for all the tabs combined, and as the Name tab has contents that require h-scroll, the h-scroll appears for all the tabs at that width.
4 . Going to System Settings > Accessibility:
For some reason it takes slightly more time to go to the Accessibility than any other heading under System Settings.
5 . sudo password prompt on login due to a script in ~/.bash-profile:
If a user puts in a script in ~./bash-profile that requires sudo privileges, then on boot, it gets stuck on the ASUS Loading image (after the user login window of course – I see the ASUS Loading window again after the user login window for some reason). Putting in the password blindly and pressing enter resumes the boot. It would have been quite nice if some indication like the usual window prompting password was visible.
PS. On boot, xwaylandbridge quit unexpectedly.
6 . Log Out not working:
For some reason, when I go to the Application Launcher > Sessions > Log Out > Log Out Now, nothing happens (let’s call it state-1). If I do it again, then again nothing happens (let’s call it state-2). If I try to to do it again, then the Log Out window doesn’t appear (let’s call it state-3). At state-1, if I go to Application Launcher > Reboot > Reboot Now, then the reboot doesn’t happen.
7 . Lock Screen mode configuration:
Locking the screen turns the display black and brings the Locked Screen up. Would be really nice (and fitting for KDE) if this were a simple fade-out animation. Similarly for unlocking the screen with a fade-in animation. As an additional request, I would love to see an option that allows to turn the screen off (fade-out) when screen is locked, similar to phones. Any key press would wake the screen (which is the current behavior when display turns off after some time. Would look cool with fade-in animation. There is none at the moment).
8 . Delay for peek at window on taskbar:
Would love to see an option that allows to adjust the delay (in ms maybe) for peek on hover at application icon on taskbar. This may be possible right now, but I couldn’t find it anywhere.
9 . KWrite - tabs behavior:
When I open text files with KWrite, they open in new KWrite window each time. I found out that there is a setting in KWrite > Settings > Behavior > Open each document in its own window which if left unchecked should open the the files as tabs in same KWrite window. Sadly this didn’t happen. Creating New file in KWrite did add that new file as tab instead of as a New Window though. May be I am just missing something.
10 . dGPU - iGPU applet for Optimus Laptops:
This is an outright selfish thing by me here. In Mint Cinnamon, there is an applet that sits on the taskbar and has three modes (intel, NVIDIA and On-Demand) allowing to toggle between them. Just thought something like that would have been cool. Even if someone knows the script to switch to these modes on Fedora KDE, that would be really really nice.
11 . GPU info in System Monitor:
On laptop with both dGPU and iGPU, in System Monitor there appear GPU1 and GPU2 under History. I am not really sure which one’s which. Would have been nice if there was info in the System Monitor that stated which GPU is which.
12 . WiFi hotspot:
Creating wifi hotspot when I am connected to a wireless network isn’t really straightforward, as no icon for creating a hotspot appears. You have to disconnect from wifi and then in appears. Not worried about it though as I had created a bug report that got merged (I think). Waiting for it to ship in upcoming version (fingers crossed).
Thanks a ton for one of the greatest desktop experiences. Loving it here.
PS.
- This got way longer than I anticipated. Should I open separate posts for these points?
- My first post here. If anything is amiss, or classification is incorrect, please feel free to correct me.