Plasma 6.7 feedback: animated notifications, system tray background apps

Help
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1

First off, thanks as always for your continuing work on the best desktop in the universe. There are some new things in Plasma 6.7 that bother me, though. (I have read the release notes.)

Animated notifications

My brain chemistry is particularly prone to being distracted by attention-grabbing animations, to the point where I cannot think about anything else until the animation disappears because thinking about the animation takes all of my focus.

I previously thought the appearing and disappearing notifications were okay, because I could look at them if I wanted to. But with the animation, now I have to look at them, so I can’t get any work done.

The only workarounds I can find are either permanently hiding notifications using do-not-disturb mode, or disabling animations system-wide. However, I’m reluctant to do either of these, because I find notifications helpful when it’s my choice whether to pay attention to them, and disabling animations also disables all system-wide transition animations (such as switching virtual desktops, minimising windows, smooth scrolling) which I find helpful. It’s a shame that there isn’t a middle-ground between keeping transitions that I invoke while hiding other animations that would distract me.

Proposed minor fix: Let me disable the notification animation specifically.

Proposed major fix: Let me keep animations on actions I invoke while skipping animations for things that happen around me. It is a shame that no operating system has thought of this.

System tray background apps

I understand that this is useful, but I’m concerned about the message that appears when opting specific apps out of this using Configure System Tray > Application Status > Never Show:

Look for a setting in Easy Effects to disable its tray icon before doing it here. Some apps’ tray icons were not designed to be disabled, and using this setting may cause them to behave unexpectedly.

Use this setting at your own risk, and do not report issues to KDE or the app’s author.

To be clear, I have disabled the system tray icon in Easy Effects. As of this update, KDE Plasma makes its own one on behalf of the app.

The wording of this message is strange because the system tray icon is created by KDE itself, not the application. I can’t report an issue with KDE’s behaviour to KDE?

2

There’s a new toggle in Animations tab:

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For background apps, I know Easy Effects, at least the flatpak, reports to the Background Portal so it then shows a tray icon to inform it’s running. This makes the warning’s wording somewhat outdated as an app can be configured to not display an icon, but Plasma does it instead. Probably an oversight, could be improved though.

3

Thanks for that. I couldn’t find it in Notifications or Desktop Effects and I didn’t know Animations had its own thing.

4

In fact, Animations is a “new-ish” page introduced in Plasma 6.4 last year, where a good part of Desktop Effects have been moved to :grin:

5

@Cadence , @stlnb, thanks to both of you. I plan to look into this with my loved ones who have attention challenges

6

I agree, I find it extremely distracting. The previous behavior was perfect for me.

Thank you for pointing me at the Animations tab. I still would have intuitively expected the setting to be in Notifications settings somewhere. Would it make sense to duplicate this checkbox for sliding animations there?

7

The option is appreciated, but I personally liked the fade animation from 6.6 and before and I find the total lack of an animation just as jarring as the sliding. It’d be nice to have a dropdown where you can choose between sliding, fading, and none.

8

As everything else is fading, and I believe it should have followed the “Fade popups in and out” option, I’d consider it a regression, so please open a bug report at bugs.kde.org.