Somehow I became the Kubuntu Product Manager recently. Lord knows how they decided to let that happen. Muahahahahaha! Anyway, we were discussing tweaks we'd like to make for 18.04 and the subject of how to move desktop widgets came up. None of us were satisfied with the default setting of having to drag from the handle--even when you set the the option to make the handles always appear on hover. We'd like to be able to move widgets on the desktop by simple drag-and-drop instead of having to show the handle first. I understand that this could offer some challenges for widgets with interactive elements, but those seem like they could be easily covered by the following: - If the user clicks-and-drags on an element that only accepts clicks, handle it as a drag instead - If the user clicks-and-drags on an element than can accept drags too, handle it as a drag. Those should handle 99% of cases. Thanks a ton, guys!
That happens when you long press already. Having things too easily movable is a big problem. We got a tonne of bad feedback back when we just had it on the pernamently visible handles. This is going to be even worse.
Long press isn't very discoverable, though. That's the other side of that coin. Maybe we could make the click-and-hold delay shorter?
The VDG (Thomas and Andrew mostly) had these ideas of some "edit mode" which would then make things movable; kinda like how things work with the panel. This got pseudo-implemented in that opening the desktop toolbox makes things movable. I think making that more discoverable will be a way forward that we can go with.
Global edit mode got in with https://phabricator.kde.org/D24265