Bug 351665

Summary: KDE shown hidden menu items available but not openable
Product: [Frameworks and Libraries] kwrited Reporter: Nick Levinson <Nick_Levinson>
Component: generalAssignee: Plasma Development Mailing List <plasma-devel>
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE    
Severity: major CC: wbauer1
Priority: NOR    
Version: unspecified   
Target Milestone: ---   
Platform: unspecified   
OS: Linux   
Latest Commit: Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Nick Levinson 2015-08-23 19:20:02 UTC
In the KDE desktop's panel, the icon for Show Hidden Icons produces a menu that might have four items, and hovering the mouse selects one item (and no item seems dimmed), but clicking it or pressing the Enter key does not do anything. Typing the first letter of the item brings up something else, which is probably only a find function. As a result, one of the items being Notifications, I couldn't see any notifications. I should be able to select and activate a menu item as in most menus in most apps.

This is in openSuse 13.2 with the KDE Plasma Desktop, updated whenever I'm notified of an update, thus using the latest version supplied with that OS of whatever KDE product this bug is coming from, running on an AMD platform.

Reproducible: Always
Comment 1 Wolfgang Bauer 2015-08-23 20:09:37 UTC
Does clicking on the icon directly (i.e. not on the text label) work?

Might be a duplicate of bug#301424...
Comment 2 Nick Levinson 2015-08-25 01:44:30 UTC
Yes, sort of.

This time, three icons were available in a nonroot account and clicking on a label did nothing and pressing Enter when an icon-label pair was selected by hovering did nothing.

Clicking on the Software Updater icon or the Battery Monitor icon worked but clicking on the Notifications icon did nothing. If that means there were no notifications, I don't know how to verify that. In the main menu (Kickoff Application Launcher), searching for Notifications got two apps but neither one said there were no messages (or any quantity of messages).

If an icon works, that's partly helpful but not adequate, because the common expectation among users is likely that clicking on either the icon or its label should have the same effect except when feedback shows it does not, such as if the label is editable, such as with a filename in a file manager.
Comment 3 Wolfgang Bauer 2015-08-25 09:15:09 UTC
(In reply to Nick Levinson from comment #2)
> This time, three icons were available in a nonroot account and clicking on a
> label did nothing and pressing Enter when an icon-label pair was selected by
> hovering did nothing.

Pressing Enter never was supported at all here.

> If an icon works, that's partly helpful but not adequate, because the common
> expectation among users is likely that clicking on either the icon or its
> label should have the same effect except when feedback shows it does not,
> such as if the label is editable, such as with a filename in a file manager.

Well, it's a bug.
But it won't be fixed any more for KDE4, as there won't be any KDE4 releases any more.
It should work fine in Plasma5 though.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 301424 ***
Comment 4 Wolfgang Bauer 2015-08-25 09:39:51 UTC
PS:
(In reply to Nick Levinson from comment #2)
> Clicking on the Software Updater icon or the Battery Monitor icon worked but
> clicking on the Notifications icon did nothing. If that means there were no
> notifications, I don't know how to verify that.

Yes, if there are no notifications, clicking on the notifications icon does nothing.
If there are notifications, the icon should not be hidden in the first place.

> In the main menu (Kickoff
> Application Launcher), searching for Notifications got two apps but neither
> one said there were no messages (or any quantity of messages).

There is no application for showing/managing desktop notifications.

I don't know what applications you found there exactly, but the only ones I find is about configuring the "system and applications notifications", where you can configure what sound should be played (or other action taken) when an application wants to notify you about certain events via KNotify.
Totally unrelated to the "desktop notifications" that are shown by that "Notifications" applet.
Comment 5 Nick Levinson 2015-09-12 17:49:26 UTC
This is for consideration for future versions if applicable, given that this one is closed to bug fixes.

Enter should be supported. I think it's common. I tested it (after the last post above) in gedit and Firefox and both support it.

> Yes, if there are no notifications, clicking
> on the notifications icon does nothing. If
> there are notifications, the icon should
> not be hidden in the first place.

Nongeeks will not expect that. That the existence of a notification means the icon has to have been relocated is too much for a nongeek to remember. So is that nonresponse means a lack of notifications, when it ordinarily means that it's broken. There should be a notifications quantity, either zero or a positive integer, stated.

Whether the two apps I saw are unrelated to the problem or not, the quantity should be somewhere, perhaps in one of those apps or perhaps elsewhere, and it should be easy for a nongeek to figure out where the quantity is.