The application launch animation in the overview effect briefly displays the wallpaper on top of the maximized window

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1

If you have a maximized window on your desktop and then launch another application from the overview search bar, a brief zoom-in animation of the current wallpaper displays over the maximized window. This zoom-in animation looks perfectly fine when there are no open windows on your desktop, but it looks bad when you have a window that is maximized. Is this a designed behavior or a bug?

Here is a gif that demonstrates the described behavior:
ezgif-7-8aa0cc6d8c

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I wouldn’t call this a bug - maybe a missing feature. Note that this effect doesn’t required a maximized window, and it doesn’t show the wallpaper “on top” of the maximized window - the other windows on the desktop are simply not shown.

You can set the animation speed to the slowest and watch it do its thing, but the process boils down to this:

  1. Start overview - all windows are tiled and visible.
  2. Start typing - all the windows are hidden.
  3. Select an application to launch - the menu is hidden, showing just the desktop: no other application is restored (regardless of maximized state)
  4. The application is launched - its window is shown in the middle of the screen and then just the new window and the desktop (the wallpaper and whatever widgets you have on the desktop) animate back to the regular view, with all the other windows still hidden.
  5. When the animation reaches the end where the new window is where it should be opened and the desktop is back to 100% of the view - all the other windows are immediately shown.

A better behavior may be that after the new application window is known - show the overview tiled view with all of the windows including the new one, then animate the whole thing back as if you launched the overview and then cancelled it. Maybe it warrants open a bug report in bugs.kde.org.

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