Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week saw huge improvements to the Plasma clipboard, KRunner, and drawing tablet support — not to mention a bunch of UI improvements in Discover, and plenty more, too! So without further ado…
Very impressed by the new driver category. That’ll mitigate so many new Linux users worrying about where to install drivers, since they’ll explicitly see that their NVIDIA and Broadcom drivers are installed (and what else matters, eh?)
Plasma’s clipboard now lets you mark entries as favorites
That’s very useful!!!
And 22 years?! Damn!!!
“What took you so long?!” ahahah
Let’s hope that “paste on select” is on it’s way too (to get fixed, not to break that 22yo record - just to be clear!!! Ahahah)…
All in all, as always, another week, another amazing amount of work KDE devs accomplished! Congratulations to everyone!
You all surely have, at least, our respect!!! 
Are there any plans to make the clipboard popup in a fixed place, like the centre of the screen? If you’re a programming and using keyboard shortcuts, the position of the mouse isn’t really all that important.
What “pushpin buttons”?
It’s that big pin button on the upper right corner of krunner, can also be found on every panel menu (start menu, wifi etc.) I think this reinforces my argument that these buttons need to be removed since users don’t even know what they do, despite them being prominently displayed everywhere you look.
I know what these do, I even use them from time to time (in system tray items, not in KRunner) and have my ordinary titlebars configured to have the “Keep above other windows” button in them all the time (it doesn’t have a pin icon, though).
I just didn’t understand that you meant them.
I use those pin buttons I’d say 5-15 times a week.
I guess you don’t use them, @vkhatab. That’s fine; you’re welcome to ignore them. 
Under what circumstances would you want to pin on top the start menu or wifi menu? The only thing I can think of is that you are trying to connect to a network and then forget the wifi password, so you pin the menu on top while you rummage your desktop for the key. This is something that happens once in a blue moon though and is resolved by finding the password before you connect.
An alternative to the button would be to just use the standard keyboard shortcut for “stay on top”, though again I don’t see much use for this feature - no other desktop has this.
Nate, you probably use them to test and screenshot widgets. Is that correct? If so that’s a developer use case, not a user use case - which can probably be accomplished with a optional keyboard shortcut.
The only reason they are even there is because every menu has a big labeled “titlebar” in the first place. Why do popup menus need titlebars in the first place? It’s fine if you don’t want to make getting rid of these things a priority but really don’t see how these things are good UX.
I don’t see the option to pin the start menu – probably because I use the classic (Windows-95-like) one.
One example you’ve given yourself, the other is when I want to write the internal IP address or the MAC address into some other window.
A bad idea – a user could press that combination by accident and wonder why some widget window is staying atop everything and obstructing his view of other windows. With the pin button and icon, it’s intuitive that a pinned windows is pinned.
In general, why do you even want to remove them so badly? These buttons are not buggy, they don’t take a lot of space and they don’t overload their windows cognitively. They’re just there in the corner and they just work.
It’s not a hill that I want to die on, but still I don’t get the push to remove them.
No, screenshotting widgets is easily done without pinning them open (Just press PrintScreen while the widget is open). Here are some of my common use cases for the feature:
OK, you’ve made your case Nate, especially with regard to krunner. I agree this could be useful. But does every panel applet really need a fat titlebar with a big pin on it? Why not slap a pin a button and a titlebar on every application menu as well then? In standard practice, the job of a popup menu is typically to be compact and get out of the way, not to pretend to be an app window which it isn’t since it can’t even be moved.
I actually “slap” the pin button onto every application window (by adding it to the decoration configuration).
Using that quite a lot, e.g. to make a browser window which contains a web meeting “follow” me around.
A bad idea – a user could press that combination by accident.
The user could do any number or things by accident then wonder what happened. A user could pin a window on top by accident, or he could press the button by accident, etc.
The only way to minimize such “accidents” is to remove fundamentally unnecessary “features”, even if some say they use them as a “heated space bar”.
One example you’ve given yourself, the other is when I want to write the internal IP address or the MAC address into some other window.
No the example I gave was not a legitimate use case. This isn’t either. If the user needs to enter the ip or mac he should use copy and paste. This is just more heated space bars.
The pin button has its place in application windows, that’s not what’s being debated. These are immovable tiny menu applets, not applications, and the pin button there is actually a stay on top button so the iconography isn’t even consistent.
Yeah, this seems like a valid issue to me. We should unify the iconography one way or the other.
Do you have a suggestion here?
I’d actually suggest changing the icon for the “all desktops” action to something that represents desktops, while using the pin symbol for stay on top in the window manager. No action needed for the plasmoids.
The pin button in the plasmoid should be made smaller and less obtrusive. Of course I’ve already stated my opinion that for most widgets it should be removed entirely.
just adding my personal anecdote:
I did few times pin the wifi status with network stats opened to see upload/download speed to figure out which browser tab is taking how much bandwidth when having several tabs with streaming content and also downloading files, etc…
I know I can open system monitor for that, but I find just pinning wifi status lot more logical and convenient, I would have to stop for a second and think what to do to figure out the system monitor way, while wifi status is no-brainer for me personally.
I certainly don’t mind those buttons, although now after reading this discussion this made me a bit wonder what’s the difference between pushpin and “keep above other windows” … answering it myself by looking at windows decorations settings. The pushpin is “on all desktops”. … ok, I use both. Very rarely, but both and I’m glad they are available in KDE. (yes, I don’t care about confused users enough to be willing to give up on these options, there is also Gnome if somebody needs more streamlined DE, right?)
as someone who only started using linux last year i was really happy to see the clipboard even having a history , this update sounds like it will make it even better , thanks to those who worked on that.