SUMMARY First of all, sorry for complaining about Present Windows again. Secondly, I'd like to express my opinion that the icons and the texts on top of application window previews are (way) too large. They overlay the acutal content that users want to see and make it even harder to distinguish between different windows and to identify the window you want to open, especially if there are many instances of the same application. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Open a lot of windows, preferably of the same application, but with different content shown 2. Trigger the Present Windows effect OBSERVED RESULT It will be very hard to quickly distinguish between the different windows, because a large parts of these will be overlayed by a considerably oversized icon. This is especially bad for small windows which are almost hidden completely behind the icon and text. (In addition to the annoying dimming effect which makes it even harder to identify windows, as outlined by users in BUG 303438). **This issue was introduced / made worse with a recent update. Icons have not been that large and overlaying before.** EXPECTED RESULT Icons should be much smaller. Moreover, I would appreciate if they could be completely disabled or configured to show up in a corner (e. g. bottom left) rather than in the middle of the application window. Operating System: KDE neon 5.22 KDE Plasma Version: 5.22.1 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.83.0 Qt Version: 5.15.3 Kernel Version: 5.8.0-55-generic (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz Memory: 7.2 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: Mesa DRI Intel® HD Graphics 4000 DOS - Constructive comments - Undo the enlargement of icon size that has taken place DONTS - Fantasising about a rewrite of Present Windows in QML. This leads into nowhere. We need something that works now, and especially we don't need disimprovements to software that already has UX issues anyway.
As far as I can see, the problematic commit is 1a9b5259 https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/commit/1a9b5259707ade9496256d35ae8ee1761989251e
This was an intentional change. We wanted to make the icons larger so that people who recognize windows on the basis of the parent app's icon (and there are such people) have an easier time of it. People who recognize windows by their thumbnails still have a 95% obscured representation of it, which is good enough at providing an at-a-glance view. Sometimes in UI design you need to balance things to that multiple different types of users are all accommodate. This was one such case. So I don't think we have plans to revert the change, sorry.
> This was an intentional change. I know. But it was a bad one. > We wanted to make the icons larger so that people who recognize windows on the basis of the parent app's icon (and there are such people) have an easier time of it. Was this a reported feature request? > People who recognize windows by their thumbnails still have a 95% obscured representation of it, which is good enough at providing an at-a-glance view. Not quite. For small windows, I'd estimate more than 50% is covered by the icon. And even for normal windows it is more than 5%, at least on a 5:4 monitor. > Sometimes in UI design you need to balance things to that multiple different types of users are all accommodate. This was one such case. I agree the icon is a nice idea in general. However, the current solution is certainly not a compromise between the two different needs. The icon is way too big. Users who recognise windows by their content are clearly disadvantaged, especially in combination with the darkening effect. > So I don't think we have plans to revert the change, sorry. Again, please rethink this. Couldn't it be made optional?