SUMMARY I would like to disable the help-tooltips of certain plasmoids, but keep the functional ones. My current concrete use-case: When the mouse hovers the kickoff button, I get a large plasma tooltip "Application starter" that I will never need but covers the window below. It would be nice to be able to get rid of that tooltip and maybe some simliar ones. On the other hand, there are many plasmoids that use tooltips with actual information, which I do not want to disable. I am not sure where the bug belongs and what's the best solution. Should I open a bug for each plasmoid that has a tooltip that advanced users won't need? Adding a setting to a single plamoid would also probably be too much. Maybe there could be a global setting which detail of help-tooltips are wanted? Then other programs could also decide to show or hide labels and help texts that are only useful for beginners.
Adding a setting for every plasmoid I'm not happy with. It'd be too niche and a time consuming UX. I think we need to take a step back on the original problem. >Maybe there could be a global setting which detail of help-tooltips are wanted? The underlying issue we have a dual usage of applet tooltips. Ones conveys additional information about what's being hovered One says it's own name + description. It's not even consistent as you can't ever see that the clock is called "Digital clock" so one overrides the other. My personal feeling is we should kill the applet describing tooltip. In edit mode you can still see the names on hover through an alternative mechanism.
> The underlying issue we have a dual usage of applet tooltips. > > Ones conveys additional information about what's being hovered > One says it's own name + description. Yes, I think that's the main point of the problem. But depending on the solution, one could also consider what additional information the user may want to disable. Not my current use-case, but I could for example imagine that a users may want to have a disk-space plasmoid for the bar chart, but not a long tooltip that may be "X MB of Y MB total (ZZ% used) on Disk 1, X MB of Y MB total (ZZ% used) on Disk 2" and another user needs this tooltip. But removing the "name + description" tooltip is the more clear scope of the bug, the other part can be considered if there would be a UI to change the amount of information a plasmoid should provide without direction interaction other than being touched by the cursor.
The applet-describing tooltip I think can be useful for new users, which is the use case for tooltips. I'm not sure it's obvious what the Show Desktop widget does based on its icon alone, and the tooltip helps there. And for Kickoff, people only know what it is and does because it's position and activation methods are essentially a UX clone of the Windows Start menu. Nothing about its icon makes it obvious. So we have a problem in that these tooltips are educational and useful if you could benefit from the education, but become annoying once you've learned it. What might make sense to me is that the "dDsable informational tooltips on mouse hover" setting in the workspace KCM only applies to these "user education" tooltips and not "functional tooltips" such as the one for the clock that shows you timezones, or the one for the Task Manager that has window thumbnails in it. Then experts can uncheck that box and lose the educational tooltips but not the functional ones.
I wonder if using tooltips (like the little yellow ones) for things like names and the plasma overlays for the functional ones is an option or would make the UI inconsistent. And I am also not sure for icons like "show more symbols" in the systray. This is not obvious and I cannot really think of an icon that would make it obvious without a tooltip that helps the first time. On the other hand, the concept of a main menu is well-known and probably already obvious from the default placement on the panel.
Right, so I think tooltips for potentially obscure icons-only buttons that explain what the buttons do is fine. They're at least better than no tooltips. But I do understand that once the tooltips have done their job and you don't need them anymore, you should be able to turn them off (as per the setting we already have) without losing functionality.
This is being discussed in https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/issues/83 and opinions seem to lean toward changing this not being a good idea for various reasons, sorry.