Widgets work fine when floating - but become giant icons in a dock?

Help
,
1

I’m trying to get some widgets into a panel docked on the right hand side of a monitor. When I place the widgets just floating onto my desktop (see attached pic) they work totally fine. Look great, etc… But as soon as I open any apps I can’t see them. So … I want to put them in a dock so they stay visible and I can snap my windows around etc. But then when I do that, they change into just gigantic icons which is totally useless. (see attached pic). The calendar widget becomes an icon of a calendar. Weather becomes an icon of a sun. Audio levels become an icon of a speaker. Etc.

How can I stop this from happening? Or some other way to get these widgets docked on the side of my monitor so other apps don’t overlay them?

Screenshot_20240314_094551
Screenshot_20240314_0945511918×1295 143 KB

2

Screenshot_20240314_093927
Screenshot_20240314_0939271550×1208 132 KB

edit: it wouldn’t let me post two pics in the original, so here is the pic of the widgets working fine when floating.

3

Unfortunately that happens with certain widgets when used in (larger) vertical Plasma Panels…
You often won’t have these problems in smaller horizontal panels.

In the past I tried to find alternative third-party widgets for Plasma 5 that would work better - like the original Weather Widget.
For Plasma 6 we will probably have to wait for a while until third-party widgets are ported or written from scratch.

4

interesting, thank you for the explanation.

Follow up question: Would it be possible to set some kind of invisible vertical line, maybe 300 pixels away from the right hand side of the monitor, so that any snapping, or window sizing, etc… respects this and won’t go past it?

Basically trying to trick the desktop into thinking there’s a panel there when there isn’t. That would allow me to just arrange all my widgets floating there, and I can snap all my windows exactly as I would if it WERE a panel.

5

Hm - I don’t know if this would really work, but I had the spontaneous theorie that you could

  • put your widgets where you want to have them on the desktop (within 300 px from the right screen margin)
  • create an empty vertical panel on the right side that is 300 px wide and always shown
  • use this third-party widget (for Plasma 6) to make your panel on the right side completely translucent: Panel Colorizer

So your widgets would be “protected” by the translucent panel on top of them…

Let us know if something like this actually works or if my thoughts were just rubbish. :wink:

1 Like