Saturday, December 19, 2009

More KDE4 rants

Seeing that I apparently hit a nerve for some people with my last post, here is the next thing that really annoys me every day in KDE4.

Notifications.

Those ugly passive pop-ups that appear on the display near the area where you have configured the "system tray" to be on the panels. From the beginning they were an example of uglyness. After quite some time they at least stopped to be drawn one over the other, so they are no longer totally unusable, but they still are not pretty.
One example: most of them are too small, so that the text they should show me gets cut off and I have to guess what the system wants to tell me.

As much as I detest GNOME, their unobtrusive notifications in the lower right corner are much more stylish and less disturbing than the KDE4 ones.

And it is not QT's fault: a proprietary application like skype, using QT, can do it in almost the same way as GNOME, so it is definitely possible.

10 comments:

  1. You can disable the Plasma notifications. It's in the systray config window.
    AFAIK GNOME will adopt the new specs developed by KDE for notifications. Hence it should be possible to use GNOME's notification deamon under Plasma.

    ReplyDelete
  2. So right now I can choose between intrusive notifications and no notifications at all. Not a good solution IMHO. But I will look into the notification-daemon solution.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I agree with you, KDE notification look very ugly. It's pretty useful for me thought...

    ReplyDelete
  4. You should check the facts before posting: I did not wrote that it'll turn off notifications entirely. I wrote that you can turn off Plasma notifications. If turned off, old-school knotify takes back the duty.

    ReplyDelete
  5. well, I did:
    * right click on the (i) icon
    => System Tray Settings
    ===> Pop Up Notices
    [ ] Application notifications
    [ ] File transfers and other jobs
    both unchecked. After that I did not get any noticable notifications when e.g. unplugging the AC adapter or similar. Maybe I misunderstood you, and I need to set something else?

    What I did get is a milisecond long popup in the middle of one of my panels that did vanish immediately. Maybe the knotify notifications are drawn on the root window? ;)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Maybe have a look at Colibri:
    http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Colibri?content=117147

    ReplyDelete
  7. Colibri looks promising, but click-through is also a usability nightmare IMHO.

    But I found out, that the gnome notification-daemon works just fine in KDE4 once you disable plasma notifications, so that's actually a usable solution.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I don't know what you do, but when I disable Plasma notifications, it looks like this: http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/4663/powerz.png
    This is under 4.4, I might add.

    ReplyDelete
  9. It does not work for me with 4.3.85. sometimes I see something that looks like a notification window poping up in the middle of my panel at the top of the screen, but it disappears a milisecond later. Might be something in my settings, but I am not keen to remove my ~/.kde and start from scratch, so we'll probably never know exactly why it works for you and does not for me.

    Anyway, your screenshot looks pretty similar to the notifications of the gnome notification-daemon, only that g-n-d has the notifications in the corner of the screen, so running that is a good solution.

    (I tried the XFCE4 notifyd, but that's like the notifications in KDE4.0 that opened all at the same place etc, so it is really not an improvement ;))

    ReplyDelete
  10. It is notification-deamon. At least the notifications of GNOME 2.28 and KDE SC 4.4 are compatible with each other, it seems.

    ReplyDelete