Bug 515251

Summary:	Tooltip flickers / appears-disappears loop in Application Launcher when hovering over entries with long .desktop Comment field
Product:	[Plasma] plasmashell	Reporter:	ravaged
Component:	Application Launcher (Kickoff) widget	Assignee:	Plasma Bugs List <plasma-bugs-null>
Status:	RESOLVED NOT A BUG
Severity:	minor	CC:	akselmo, mikel5764, noahadvs
Priority:	NOR
Version First Reported In:	6.5.5
Target Milestone:	1.0
Platform:	KDE Linux
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed/Implemented In:
Sentry Crash Report:
Attachments:	Start menu: if the comment in the tooltip is long, the tooltip flashes; if the comment is short, the tooltip stops flashing.

Description ravaged 2026-01-29 10:27:29 UTC

Created attachment 189022 [details]
Start menu: if the comment in the tooltip is long, the tooltip flashes; if the comment is short, the tooltip stops flashing.

SUMMARY

I am experiencing a flickering tooltip issue in the Plasma Application Launcher (Kickoff) when hovering over application icons that have a long "Comment" field in their .desktop files.

In some cases, when navigating through the menus, the tooltip displays correctly (without blinking) but it is rare, random, and I cannot reproduce it reliably.

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STEPS TO REPRODUCE
1. Open the Application Launcher (Kickoff) menu (default menu from the taskbar or Super key).
2. Hover the mouse over an application entry whose .desktop file has a long Comment (e.g., Tor browser in my example).
3. Observe the tooltip behavior.



Actual result:
The tooltip appears briefly, then disappears, reappears, and loops in a flickering/appear-disappear cycle. This happens continuously while the mouse is over the icon.

Expected result:
The tooltip should appear stably and remain visible as long as the mouse hovers over the entry, without flickering or disappearing.

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Additional information:

The issue is directly related to the length of the Comment field in the .desktop file: shortening the comment like in my video makes the flickering disappear completely.

This is not caused by the tooltip overlapping the mouse pointer position (unlike bug #510860 or similar pointer-overlap issues). The flickering persists even if I carefully position the mouse to avoid any overlap.
It occurs on KDE Plasma 6.5.5 (tested after clean update; no custom modifications to Kickoff).

I found a report with similar behavior in KDE 6.4.5 which should be related to cursor coordinates, and which should be fixed now.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=510860

In my case, when navigating between menus and scrolling with the wheel, sometimes the tooltip (long text) displays correctly, but it is hit or miss and I cannot reproduce the correct behavior with certainty.

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SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS

Fedora 43 KDE
KDE Plasma : 6.5.5
KDE Framework : 6.22.0
Qt version : 6.10.1
Kernel : 6.18.6-200.fc43.x86_64
Wayland

Comment 1 Akseli Lahtinen 2026-01-29 11:06:03 UTC

I can't reproduce this on git master

Operating System: KDE Linux 2026-01-28
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.80
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.23.0
Qt Version: 6.10.1
Kernel Version: 6.18.6-zen1-1-zen (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 12 × AMD Ryzen 5 3600 6-Core Processor
Memory: 16 GiB of RAM (15.5 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 6600

Comment 2 ravaged 2026-01-29 22:14:11 UTC

SOLVED

This problem was caused by icons that were too large in another menu: Games. I had customized many icons, about 20 of them, at 512x512 pixels.

I resized all these images (using a batch process with the command `magick mogrify -resize 256x256 *.png`), and refreshed the icon cache. This resizing was intended to optimize the display of the Start menu, and it also resolved the blinking tooltip, which must have been a side effect of poorly optimized icons.