Desktop usability issues: some comments from the country of bears, vodka and ISO8859-5

[John Tapsell]

2009/9/1 Sergey Udaltsov <sergey.udaltsov at gmail.com>:
> Another issue - stealing focus. In X Window, every app that requests
> focus, gets it.

I think KWin disables focus stealing by default.  Either way, you can
turn it on focus-stealing-prevention.

> 2. Primary X Window selection behavior
> ...
> Conclusion: standardize KDE approach to primary selection

Talk to the gnome people then...  maybe write a freedesktop proposal.

> 3. Open/Save dialogs
>
> The dialogs are platform-specific, it is a well-known fact. It would
> not be technically difficult to provide the selection mechanism -
> allowing user to choose the dialog variant he likes best. It can be
> done using DBUS calls. Once this interface is standardized, the
> dialogs could be implemented using FLTK, openmotif, ...

If it's not technically difficult, send a patch :-D
There have actually been an (several?) attempt to do so, since it also
adds the advantage of being easier to secure, selinux style.  I
thought the portland project was going to have a go, but I can't see
anything on their website about it.

> There is one closely related issue - the bookmarking mechanism, used in these dialogs, should be standardized as well.

meh

>
> Conslusion: There is a need in DBUS standard on this interface.
> Additionally, we need some convension for bookmarks (something like
> directory .config/bookmarks with symlinks or .desktop files or
> smth...).

Write a spec for this and propose it.

> The most serious issues to address: relatively expensive
> outproc calls,

What's outproc?

> no standard VFS used by all DEs

Difficult.  Something portland is/was also trying to solve.


> difficult per-app
> customization of the open/save dialog (used by some apps).

So..  it is "technically difficult" then? :P


> 4. Hotkeys and layout switching shortcuts are sometimes not compatible
>
> This bug is as ancient as X11 and XKB. Once you configure Ctrl+Shift
> as layout switching (=group switching) shortcut in XKB, you cannot use
> it in "normal shortcuts". The root cause of that is that X11 always
> acts on key press, not on key release - and you cannot assign
> different actions on key press and key release.
>
> Conclusion: X.Org/XKB should be (incompatibly?) fixed: allow
> specifying separate actions on key press and key release. It most
> probably would explode a living hell of issues, but we'll never know
> till we try.
>
> 5. Global hotkeys are controlled in several places.
>
> GNOME apps tend to start gnome-settings-daemon (otherwise they look
> weird). And g-s-d may grab some shortcuts. If it happens in KDE, the
> results may be unpredictable - two sets of hotkeys are interfering...
>
> Conclusion: actually, none. We need a good idea here
>
> 6. Independend passwords/keys storages
>
> Conclusion: We need either single cross-desktop wallet or, at least,
> secure DBUS interface to access one.

I think this is being worked on by someone.  Google around maybe.


John