Hello everyone!
I recently received my Steam Controller, and noticed that this pop up appears when turning on the controller with Steam open (plasma-desktop 6.6.5-1 on Arch).
From my research, it appears this popup is needed to allow devices like this to properly work with XWayland applications (so it makes sense that this only pops up when Steam itself is open, which takes over the controller’s input handling).
While the popup seems to be needed, in its current state it’s a bit confusing and will show on every reboot without informing the user about the setting that enables it to always allow this. I’d like to propose a few improvements to this popup, and wanted to get some feedback before looking into implementing this myself. Here is a quick mock-up of the changes I’m proposing:
The changes are as follows:
1. Include what application is requesting access
Currently the dialog doesn’t mention what program is requesting this, which can be confusing (especially since the words “remote control” and “control input devices” could sound a bit serious to a user who doesn’t understand why the dialog exists). Adding the name and icon of the application that is requesting this access would make the dialog much less ambiguous.
2. Add a checkbox for “Always allow”
Currently, the application will produce this popup again after a reboot, and it isn’t clear that there is a way to always allow the application to do this. Adding a checkbox to the dialog would allow the user to This would enables the existing “Control pointer & keyboard, and share screen with other apps without asking” toggle as seen in the image below:
I am curious if a “remember my decision” style toggle might be a better option, if anyone has thoughts on that please let me know. Although I’m not sure if always deny and suppressing the window is currently exposed in the UI.
3. Add a quick link to open the System Settings → Application Permissions → App page
Similarly, adding a button that opens the page in the image above would be helpful. I’ve represented this with the new window icon (which would likely say something like “View in System Settings” on hover), but I’d like to hear if there’s any other areas in Plasma that do something similar to this to maintain consistency.
I think this change will also be helpful in the future when the Steam Machine releases, as AFAIK this popup would get triggered when using a Steam Controller on that as well (given that SteamOS uses KDE Plasma in desktop mode).
If there’s any misconceptions I have about this or edge cases please let me know, I saw some conflicting information on this popup and setting. If everything looks good I’d like to go ahead and implement this myself, I’m a software engineer who has been keeping an eye out for potential contributions for a few months now and think this would be a decent first PR for someone new to KDE’s codebase. If there’s anything I should know about this process that isn’t on the wiki please let me know.
PS: Thank you so much to all the contributors, a few months ago I moved my desktop fully to Linux and Plasma has been a fantastic experience.