Bug 371489

Screenshot:
https://s16.postimg.org/553mzlhw5/IMG_5995.jpg

Hi,
Thanks for reporting and sorry for the delay for answering.
We are aware of the complain about breeze being too space consuming (although in general one does get use to it). There are plans to have a "compact" breeze mode. It just needs some time to implement.

(In reply to Hugo Pereira Da Costa from comment #2)
> Hi,
> Thanks for reporting and sorry for the delay for answering.
> We are aware of the complain about breeze being too space consuming
> (although in general one does get use to it). There are plans to have a
> "compact" breeze mode. It just needs some time to implement.

Thank you! :) It will be very useful, especially on 10 to 14" displays in netbooks. Wish you success to the work! :)

Compact mode for Breeze and Oxygen5 is very much needed. It is critical for low resolution screens, but also can be helpful on higher resolution screens.

+++

The elements are not just looking too big, they are.

I've been mentioning this since the first time I tried the new Oxygen theme for KDE4.

I've never worked on a very high res screen (1080p is more than enough for me) but I kind of expect that the size of the style elements will be proportional to the font size you're using. IOW, the screen estate waste will be comparable on a 4k screen when fonts are configured to have a comparable apparent size as on a normal resolution screen.

Remember you can buy a new hires screen which a certain company calls a Retina screen, but you cannot replace those 2 actual screens we biologists call retinas. And their effective resolving power doesn't increase over time...

*** Bug 382740 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

When it will be fixed? Need to switch to other style for now?

No longer an issue today.

(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #8)
> No longer an issue today.

Why? When and how it was fixed? Still using QtCurve instead.

Better than Oxygen style and may have improved a bit, but definitely still a problem. Try to use Plasma 5 on a notebook with a small low-resolution display. Still using KDE4.

(In reply to dev.dliw from comment #10)
> Still using KDE4.

Here idem, for the DE at least.

Are there any modern distros that still get updates (= newer than Ubuntu 14.04) that still have packages for the Plasma4 desktop?

I don't think this is an actionable issue, sorry. :( There is a vocal contingent of users on both sides of this issue: right now, we get bug reports and complaints from people who think everything is too big, as well as from people who think everything is too small! So we don't really have any freedom of movement here without annoying one group even more. Accordingly, I think we have to stay with how things are right now, and be content with small tweaks on a case-by-case basis, as needed.

(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #12)
> I don't think this is an actionable issue, sorry. :( 

It is!

> contingent of users on both sides of this issue: right now, we get bug
> reports and complaints from people who think everything is too big, as well
> as from people who think everything is too small! 

First, the ticket created by people who remember how it was and has applications to compare.

Second, who do no rely on KDE team to fix this can use Qt Curve which has tons of options and similar or same controls styles, but elements and spaces between lines are good.

(In reply to Nate Graham from comment #12)
> I don't think this is an actionable issue, sorry. :( There is a vocal
> contingent of users on both sides of this issue: right now, we get bug
> reports and complaints from people who think everything is too big, as well
> as from people who think everything is too small! So we don't really have
> any freedom of movement here without annoying one group even more.

Oh yes you have. I'd say there are at least 2 possibilities:
- create additional breeze-xs (lull?) and breeze-xl (gale?) styles. My guess is that you can generate them from the same code with appropriately chosen constant scale factors that are applied at compile time.
- make the airyness a user-controllable parameter so that users can fine-tune this aspect themselves.

It stands to reason that monitor size, resolution, visual acuity and last but not least personal taste are all at play here, meaning that the members of both the "too large" and the "too small" contingents probably disagree over just how much things are too large or small. The latter solution would thus be the preferable one - and undoutedly also the most interesting (challenging) to get right.

> Accordingly, I think we have to stay with how things are right now, and be
> content with small tweaks on a case-by-case basis, as needed.

Like I said, making things smaller would upset the people who say that things are already too small. So that's not an option

However we could conceivably make the internal padding configurable to allow people to self-satisfy, like in QtCurve and Fusion. So I can mark this as a duplicate of the bug report that requests that.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 418904 ***

And I said create two ADDITIONAL styles, one smaller, one larger, so that all 3 camps (assuming there are indeed 3) have a choice.

But it should be possible to make the padding (as well as the size of elements) scalable with a single slider, even if inside there are multiple mappings being made from that single scale value. Or maybe it'd be better to have 2 sliders, one for the padding, one for element size.

Created attachment 135793 [details]
Dolphin menu in KDE4 and Plasma 5.20 side by side

Just for illustration: the Dolphin menu has only 4 entries more in Plasma 5.20, but it needs significantly more space. Identical settings: DPI, font and font size. On this particular device, this is almost the entire screen height.

I guess that those who complain about sizes being too small have a high density device and are not aware of the scaling option.

Leider ist dies eine von vielen "Design-Innovationen" von Plasma 5, die sich wie "mobile first" anfühlen und das Benutzererlebnis für Desktop-Benutzer zunehmend verschlechtern. Und das sage ich als jemand, der seit fast 20 Jahren ausschließlich KDE verwendet (derzeit noch KDE4).

Sorry, I accidentally activated my translator. The last part means:

Unfortunately, this is one of many "design innovations" of Plasma 5 that feel like "mobile first" and increasingly degrade the user experience for desktop users. And I say that as someone who has used KDE exclusively for almost 20 years (currently still KDE4).