The current behavior: Busy indicators like the launch feedback in the icons-only and icons-and-text task managers are showing, but are “frozen” in place when the global animation speed is set to instant. My assumption with the global animation speed slider was that it only controls transitions.
In the old, but probably related bug report https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=443783, Nate wrote: “I recall that we received the opposite bug report in the past, as I see we explicitly handle this in the code with a comment that makes it clear that it’s expected. Therefore I’m going to make an executive decision that this is intentional. :)”.
But frankly speaking, I disagree. If this is really intended as a global animation turn-off switch, then we’d also have to turn off time-out animations in pop-ups for example. At the moment this feels simply inconsistent.
So, I wonder how others feel about this. My current “workaround” is that I set the animation speed to the fastest settings before “instant” on all my systems. While this works well enough for me, it simply “bugs” me (pun intended).