SUMMARY The window preview thumbnails that appear when hovering over a task manager entry disappear after five seconds. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Hover the mouse pointer over a task manager entry 2. Keep the mouse still 3. Observe the thumbnail OBSERVED RESULT The thumbnail disappears after 5 seconds. EXPECTED RESULT The thumbnail continues to show while the mouse pointer is in the appropriate position. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Operating System: openSUSE Tumbleweed 20230518 KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.5 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.106.0 Qt Version: 5.15.9 Kernel Version: 6.3.2-1-default (64-bit) Graphics Platform: X11 Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i5-7200U CPU @ 2.50GHz Memory: 15.5 GiB of RAM Graphics Processor: Mesa Intel® HD Graphics 620 Manufacturer: HP Product Name: HP ProBook 450 G4
So in the past I might have said something along the lines of "this is intentional; they're tooltips and all tooltips time out after 5 seconds." But today tooltip don't disappear until the cursor is moved elsewhere, so on that basis, these should do the same. But on the other hand, even though *technically* they're tooltips, they kind of don't always behave like tooltips. Unlike tooltips, they're large and interactive. We don't call them "tooltips" in the UI anymore. And their size can make them quite intrusive. We already make them never disappear when the cursor is over them, but if we made them never disappear when the cursor was simply over the thing that made them appear, it might be too annoying.
I completely agree - the window previews are tooltips, with a blend animation on them, the same as with any panel tooltips. I myself have found this annoying, as when you have many windows open, it could take a while to identify which preview you want to move the cursor to, before finding that the previews have suddenly disappeared. I don't think most people expect them to.
I did wonder if it was intentional to make them disappear. Maybe that decision can be reviewed by UX people. My use case is that I sometimes like to monitor what's happening in another window (e.g. a compile, or a chat) without needing to bring up the full size window, or resize windows or split my desktop. The five second timeout is too short for that. I'm sure there are other ways to achieve my use case, but hovering over the task manager entry is quick, easy, and intuitive. For what it's worth, the window preview "tooltips" don't timeout in MS Windows. Not that we should always copy everything Microsoft does, but there is the argument of "matching user expectations". Also, I assume Microsoft spend millions on user testing research so (although again that doesn't mean they get everything right) it's nice to piggy-back on that! As mentioned, other tooltip-like things don't timeout, including some equally large/intrusive ones such as the Virtual Desktop Pager, so it's not consistent. I don't think it's particularly onerous to make the user move the mouse to a non-tooltippy area if they find the preview intrusive.
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/merge_requests/1528
Git commit 728cf19e307b895fd53efebcb4422a7747d0e08d by Nate Graham. Committed on 25/05/2023 at 03:42. Pushed by ngraham into branch 'master'. applets/taskmanager: don't time out preview tooltips In general we don't time out any tooltips now as long as the cursor remains hovered over the thing that opened the tooltip. One exception is Task Manager window thumbnail tooltips. This may simply have been missed during the change to no longer time out any tooltips (it has a local override for the new default behavior) or it might have been intentional at the time. But either way, it's probably better to follow the default settings here for reasons of consistency, not to mention to make it easier to interact with the preview thumbnails, especially when there are multiple windows open. FIXED-IN: 5.27.6 M +0 -4 applets/taskmanager/package/contents/ui/Task.qml https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/commit/728cf19e307b895fd53efebcb4422a7747d0e08d