Bug 450538

Created attachment 146926 [details]
How it works and how it should work

SUMMARY
Task Manager displays all windows ALWAYS with their labels (unless the taskbar is full). 
Icons-Only Task Manager displays all windows ALWAYS without their labels.

There is no option in either one to display or hide labels for the windows the user wants to.

* The problem is impaired productivity: *
- Having many browser windows open (web developers and even normal web users tend to have many open browser windows with many tabs), to achieve maximum productivity, labels must be displayed (so Icons-Only Task Manager is not an option), and grouping disabled (it is useless if you care about productivity),
- Same problem as above when opening multiple LibreOffice documents - for maximum productivity grouping should be disabled and labels enabled, so user can quickly switch to the other document just by its name,
- Taskbar space quickly cramps up and the labels are not shown anymore, so users have to wait for the tooltips and see the labels there. It is an enormous waste of time during everyday work with KDE Plasma,
- There are other programs open that use only one window, like instant messengers (Skype etc.), IDEs (kDevelop, NetBeans, Qt Creator and so on), Email clients etc. Those don't need a label at all, as users can easily and instantly identify them by an icon; while having multiple browser windows open, users can't determine which window contains the websites set they are looking for, without the labels. This is especially useful since browsers started letting users name the windows (change the labels in taskbar). This is not only a multi-window browser scenario, but also true for working with multiple folders in Dolphin, where real file managing requires having all the folders visible at once - tabs in Dolphin simply aren't near as productive, because you can only see one folder at once. 
- There are many other scenarios, where taskbar space becomes wasted by launching many applications having only one window.

* This was already suggested and developed back in 2018 and 2019! How is that possible, those commits have not got released: *
https://phabricator.kde.org/D12462
https://phabricator.kde.org/D12463

There is an unnecessary discussion in above links, but the problem is super simple:
1. Pinning windows/tasks to the taskbar should have nothing to do with the option to hide or show labels. Taskbar is not a browser and even browsers are missing a feature to display the title on a pinned tab.
2. Having two widgets - Task Manager and Icons-Only Task Manager makes no sense. There should be just one widget with a global feature flag in configuration window like "Show labels", exactly like in Windows 10.
3. If you want to keep those widgets separetely - no problem, but NONE of them has the functionality that Windows 10 taskbar has from years.


STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Set panel widget to Task Manager (with labels)
2. Open Task Manager configuration and disable grouping (useless feature if you care about productivity, anyway),
3. Open many windows of one application (like Dolphin, Firefox, or multiple LibreOffice documents),
4. Open programs having just 1 window (instant messengers, IDE, Email client),
5. Right-click any window, go to "More actions" and look for "Hide label" or "Display icon only" option.


OBSERVED RESULT
1. Labels of important windows (browser windows, opened LibreOffice documents, Dolphin windows) are narrowed very quickly, then become not readable and finally become hidden, because of lacking space on the taskbar, that is taken up by one-window applications, where just an icon would be enough.
2. There is no "Hide label" or "Display icon only" option in "More actions".
3. There is no such option in configuration window.


EXPECTED RESULT
1. Like suggested in 2018 and 2019, there should be an option in "More actions" for each window/task to hide or show label. This should be saved into config and reloaded next time the task is launched.
2. For maximum productivity, those commits from 2018/2019 should have been added to Plasma long time ago. This is the only thing in the Plasma taskbar that users miss from switching from Windows. 


SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS
Windows: 10
macOS: n/a
Linux/KDE Plasma: Kubuntu 21.10 / KDE Plasma 5.24
(available in About System)
KDE Plasma Version: 5.24
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.86.0
Qt Version: 5.15.2

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
KDE Plasma 5 is the only Linux GUI that really can compete with Windows in terms of usability and look (I'm sorry, but other GUIs are just ugly and lack basic task managing features, or try to resemble macOS with global menubar at the top, which even more impaires productivity, exactly like on macOS - a system created for working with one application, not multitasking). KDE apps are great and Plasma 5 is superior to previous editions - it's fast, agile and reliable. Still, it is a surprise that there are only a few options to configure, and that user contributions with ready-to-deploy code are ommited and then forgotten.
There is no need to write new code - you have it on hand, just to test it and deploy.