Mine the Harvest

I have been using KDE 4.1.2 and 4.1.3 on my Suse 11 desktop at home for some time. A while back though I came across something which was very annoying, and it took me a bit to figure it out. The solution is of course obvious – but its just one of those things.

I wanted each of my virtual desktops to only display applications on the task bar that were on that desktop. By default KDE 4 displays all applications, from all desktops, on the task bar. I find this extremely annoying. Why have virtual desktops when all the apps are on the task bar of every desktop? I guess to each his own, but for me – it had to go.

A simple Google search reveals hundreds of suggestions of “Just right click on the panel and click on ‘Task Manager Settings” – easier said than done. You see you don’t actually click just anywhere on the panel – you have to right click on the task manager section of the panel. Of course if you have open tasks, they fill the task manager, and so anywhere you right click will lack the “Task Manager Settings” option. Hunt for it in vain my friend, though shalt never find it.

I honestly thought I had a broken KDE 4.1.2, or an earlier version of plasma or the panel, and so upgraded to 4.1.3 on my Kubuntu system at work, only to find it didn’t fix the problem. Then I found the same thing on my Suse box at home. Great silliness.

When you realize you just have to close all open applications and then click on the (now empty) task bar (not panel) and the setting is now displayed, well . . . it seemed a bit silly.

As an experienced Linux user I found this to be a pretty goofy design.

I do however very much like the new panel, and how you can resize it and move it. I also like the new Oxygen art work, it looks very nice. And you can place widgets on the desktop or the panel and they have different graphics for each use, etc. All very nice. But this one thing just annoyed the crap out of me. Hopefully if you found this it helped you resolve the same problem.

Overall though I do have to say, once to adapt to it – KDE 4 is pretty tight. Although some people do not like it, I have found Dolphin (the new file manager) to be pretty decent, though I still use Konqueror and the IO slaves like fish:// with it. Some of the visual elements of KDE 4 are quite nice though.