Bug 456420 - scale up notification popups in fullscreen
Summary: scale up notification popups in fullscreen
Status: CLOSED INTENTIONAL
Alias: None
Product: plasmashell
Classification: Plasma
Component: Notifications (show other bugs)
Version: 5.24.5
Platform: Debian unstable Linux
: NOR wishlist
Target Milestone: 1.0
Assignee: Plasma Bugs List
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2022-07-06 22:23 UTC by Oswald Buddenhagen
Modified: 2023-04-28 18:21 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

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Description Oswald Buddenhagen 2022-07-06 22:23:52 UTC
when a fullscreen application (like a video player) is in the foreground, there is a good chance that the user is located significantly further away from the screen than usually. therefore, for notification popups to be still useful, they need to be scaled up.

UI-wise, i would realize this by adding a configurable integer scaling factor (default maybe 2 or 3) to the notification settings.
Comment 1 Nate Graham 2022-07-13 18:03:40 UTC
> there is a good chance that the user is located significantly further away from the screen than usually
I'm not sure that's something we can guarantee. It's certainly not true of my usage of full screen video or apps on either desktop or laptop computers I've used. It is true of my living room PC which has a giant screen, but in that case I increase the scaling for *everything*. And being in a fullscreen productivity app like a web browser or word processor won't require being farther back from the screen at all

Regardless, even if it was true and we did this, making the notification popups bigger while a fullscreen app is active, it would be hugely annoying to people since it would cover up more of the video or application content. So I don't think it would be a good idea, sorry.
Comment 2 Oswald Buddenhagen 2022-07-13 18:38:11 UTC
to make it more accurate, one can track user activity - excluding apps which have no idle time (compare #456421) pretty much eliminates everything that qualifies as a "productivity app". though one would have to exclude simulated user activity (screensaver suppression), which may be a bit tricky.

one can also make the detection app-specific, for which the notification config already has provisions. though the existing infra won't help distinguishing between apps running in a browser - for that, window title matching would have to be done.

wholesale scaling isn't an option for me, as my regular desktop (with a large-ish screen) is also my home cinema.
this conveniently also makes the fullscreen app distinction a complete non-issue for me, as presentation apps are the *only* ones that ever run fullscreen.

the size of the popups doesn't matter much for the annoyance level. if one doesn't want them, that's presumably what the app-specific dnd setting is for (though i have no clue how that state is determined).

if you think that this would be too unreliable even with these qualifications, then leave the default scale factor at one (though that would make the feature a lot less discoverable).
Comment 3 Nate Graham 2022-07-14 15:53:48 UTC
If your use case involved using a computer as a combination PC/home theater, the problem is even harder, because making the notifications bigger while watching a full-screen video makes sense there, but not for the use case of viewing a full-screen video on a laptop screen. There's no reliable way that Plasma can guess what your intention or use case is here. I think you're going to need to be more explicit, and as such, adding elements of a TV-centric "10-foot UI" style into Plasma Desktop does not strike me as the ideal approach; it's a desktop shell after all, and alternative shells exist for radically different use cases like being a home theater system. Plasma Bigscreen is a TV-centric Plasma shell that you might consider looking to; you could explicitly quit Plasma Desktop and launch Plasma Bigscreen when you use the PC as a home theater system.

So I don't think we can accommodate the original request for Plasma Desktop, sorry.
Comment 4 Oswald Buddenhagen 2022-07-14 16:09:04 UTC
switching the shell on the fly is not practical, as that may happen several times during a single "tv session". sometimes i un-fullscreen, sometimes switch the virtual desktop. this is supposed to be *fast* and non-disruptive.

i don't see why plasma would need to distinguish desktops from laptops. it's supposed to be an *option*. laptop users just won't use it.

please stop closing this as long as your only argument is "it can't be made perfect".
Comment 5 Kai Uwe Broulik 2022-07-14 16:19:55 UTC
Which notifications are we even talking about here? "Your battery is low" is pretty much the only notification that would pop up during fullscreen video playback.
Comment 6 Oswald Buddenhagen 2022-07-14 16:24:54 UTC
my primary use case is explained in bug 456422. these notifications do get through.
Comment 7 Nate Graham 2023-04-28 00:08:37 UTC

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 411314 ***
Comment 8 Oswald Buddenhagen 2023-04-28 07:37:09 UTC
no. while the issues are related, this is definitely NOT a duplicate. this isn't about noticeability, but about legibility under certain circumstances, which requires context-sensitive behavior. i see the issues as orthogonal (if you made the font size configurable, i'd *still* want a setting to double/triple its size while full-screen).
Comment 9 Nate Graham 2023-04-28 18:16:13 UTC
I really don't think we're going to make just the notification size/scale configurable while in full screen mode. This would be disruptive for the majority of users who use apps in full screen mode outside of your use case. To avoid that, it would have to be an off-by-default setting and I suspect you would be the only person who turns it on. We'd have to maintain a whole separate codepath for the expanded layout which would be infrequently exercised and bit-rot.

I'm afraid going down this path isn't in the cards, sorry.

You are of course welcome to locally patch the code to do whatever you'd like for your own purposes.
Comment 10 Oswald Buddenhagen 2023-04-28 18:21:52 UTC
if supporting switching the font size in such a simple widget would impose an unbearable maintenance burden, then you should seriously rethink your technology choices.

i wonder how bit-rotting would work for a feature that would be used on my systems almost daily?