When KDE Plasma starts, I run a startup script which launches a bunch of applications. So when I finally sit down at the computer, everything is ready.
But since switching to KDE Plasma, there is a slight annoyance about the “task manager”: some of the window bars, such as mpv playing a background ambiance track, is visually “painted” in orange, probably meaning that it’s “requested attention” for some reason. Only by clicking it in the taskbar twice (once to bring it up and another time to minimize it) does it go away.
Also, VirtualBox does the same with the two VMs that I autostart, and they also have two separate “bars” until I click one of them. Once I do that, they “group” together into one “Orace VM VirtualBox” taskbar group.
Is there some way to “shake the taskbar around”, so to speak, automatically, from the terminal, without manually having to click several times down there for it to settle into a “clean” mode? (I mean to make them not painted orange and to be grouped rather than separated.)
Basically because the script of mine first does things such as decrypts and mounts my non-system internal disks, which contain files accessed by the programs, so they must start in the correct order. Also because I had started the script (PHP CLI) while I was still running Windows, so it was nice to not have to set up everything custom in the new OS. (But of course the paths and stuff changed, so I still had to update my code.)
I’m guessing that the issue is that Plasma isn’t aware of the applications being launched - there’s no application startup notifications it normally gets when you launch stuff from their desktop entries.
If you’re using X11, you may want to look at xdg-launch as a way to launch the applications with proper desktop notifications, but it doesn’t support on Wayland - so if you’re using that, it wouldn’t help.
I would check if moving one of the most offending applications from the script to a startup application and see if that solves the problem, or we’re completely barking up the wrong tree.
not sure about the decryption aspect but i have my KDE desktop session set to restore previous saved session so that every time i reboot come back to the set of open applications and windows that were open when i restarted.
there is also the option (which i’ve not tried) to have it restart from a fixed set of apps and windows every time (sort of like your script)… then there are activities where you can have multiple sets of sessions with completely different set ups you can switch between.
also, in my view getting suspend to work properly is worth the effort so that you can just let your machine go to sleep and when it wakes up you are EXACTLY where you left off… cursor blinking in the unfinished post to KDE discuss and everything.
well except clementine refuses to continue playing the current song unless i hit the PLAY button, but other than that.
Sadly, XFCE’s “sessions” killed any enthusiasm I had about “saving the session”. Caused nothing but problems to do it that way. Maybe works better in KDE Plasma, but why does this happen just because I launch programs myself?
Session restore isn’t really working in Wayland, and as we’re heading to a Wayland-only future pretty fast, I would be careful extolling Plasma’s session restore capabilities until it works in Wayland.
I cannot figure out what this actually is, why it’s needed or how to install it (but I don’t want to do that). Why would I need some third-party Github code to start applications without them being painted orange in the taskbar, or not grouping before I click on them?