Reviewing Plasma themes

[Aleksey Alekseyev]

Greetings, mighty Plasma people!

I maintain a Russian blog about KDE since 4.0 went out -- you can find
it at http://knotes.ru (I have several co-bloggers there now, but I am
the most active) Recently I have posted a big review of Plasma themes
-- the text is of course in Russian, but in this case screenshots
matter the most:

http://knotes.ru/2010/03/plasma-themes-1/
http://knotes.ru/2010/03/plasma-themes-2/
http://knotes.ru/2010/03/plasma-themes-3/
http://knotes.ru/2010/03/plasma-themes-4/

I want to give you some observations based on work I done.

1. Most of popular themes (I reviewed the themes bundled with Plasma
and some highest rated/most downloaded themes from GHNS) have
usability problems. I was surprised to see either black text on dark
background or white text on light background in so many themes. Some
themes don't work well with too dark/too light backgrounds (that's why
I provided 2 screenshots for each theme). Lancelot has problems with
many dark themes (I didn't provide a Lancelot screenshot for each
theme, but I specified in the text part which themes tend to show
black-on-dark text in Lancelot). Network monitoring widget has
problems with most of themes.

One would think that default theme shipped with KDE SC 4.4 shouldn't
have all these problems -- yet it's very hard to see something on
network monitoring widget with this theme (also: please make old Air
available as an alternative)

2. Plasma is still unstable. I had more than a dozen crashes of Plasma and KWin.

Of course, it's not typical to have so many widgets on desktop, but it
seems like a good test case when you're working on stability.

3. Widgets are clumsy. Arranging them took some time and made whish to
punch my monitor, because widgets tend to jump back after I resized
and/or moved them. This again is not as annoying when you don't have
so many widgets, but it's something that you might to want to look at.
Folder View is exceptionally cunning: if I move/resize it, and then
restart Plasma, it tends to move back where it was before I moved it.

4. I hate new widget explorer. It has so many usability problems, I
could write another lengthy rant about it. Please go back to the old
add widgets dialog and explore the posibilities of improving it.

Please understand that even though that maybe sounded like an angry
rant, I consider myself a big supporter of KDE4, so I am posting these
observations here, to the people who are working on these things, so
you can probably fix them.

Thanks for your great work on KDE and Plasma!


Aleksey
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Re: Reviewing Plasma themes

[Aleksey Alekseyev]

 backtraces?

Plasma mostly just silently restarted. Also I am not sure if I had
debug information at the moment (I do have it now though)

 you'd likely end up observing issues we already know about and are working on.
 you could also offer useful, constructive feedback. not much to say,
 otherwise.

All right, I'll try to be constructive.

Two main elements of Widget explorer is the list of categories and the
list of widgets.

The primary problem with categories is there are quite a lot of them,
and presenting a very long list in a horizontal strip is bad,
because you have to scroll a lot (especially with how scrolling that
list is handled in 4.4) and you can't scan it at a glance. Having so
many categories and making it hard to explore and navigate the list of
them defeats their purpose

The list of widgets makes in its current form makes it hard to both
explore the widgets you have and finding one particular widget you
need at the moment. Exploring the widgets is inconvenient, because you
have to mouse-over every one of them to read what they are doing.
Finding a particular widget is hard, because the icons are not always
self-explanatory (and sometimes several widgets share icons) and text
with the name of the widget is in small font (and again, sometimes you
need to re-check the description to be sure that this widget is the
one you're looking for) and gets clipped for long names..

Just yesterday I spent several minutes looking for widget which helps
me post images/texts to the internet. It wasn't in Internet and
services category, its icon didn't catch my eye and scanning widgets
by their names is not possible with current layout. Finally I started
thinking Wait, how is the site I post text to is called... yes,
pastebin!, then typed pastebin in the search box and finally found
the widget I needed

 (e.g. icons on the desktop.)

Hey, I don't like icons on desktop either (though their absence is
very confusing for those who switch to KDE)

I like where you're going with Plasma and the concept of activities
and I'm trying to do my best in telling Russian-speaking users about
new developments.
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