Created attachment 166041 [details] Very hard to pinpoint even the country, without borders, different colors, etc. SUMMARY The map for sunset and sunrise at manual location is not too good STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Open System Settings 2. Go to Colors & Themes -> Night Light 3. Set "Switching times:" to: "Sunset and sunrise at manual location" OBSERVED RESULT 1. The map is very barebones. There are no borders shown, no labels show and no cities shown. There are also no different colors per country. The only thing that helps you orient on it are water parts. If your location is very far from a water part you can even miss the whole country. If the country is small and there are other countries nearby, most likely you will miss putting the pin in the right country. Look at the attached screenshot to see how hard it is to pinpoint any of Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary or Serbia. 2. The map container is pretty small so there's a lot a zooming in and moving the map. EXPECTED RESULT Even if you use this method to setting the location, either for privacy reasons or because you don't have internet access, the map should be more helpful to be able to set a more accurate location. I expected the map to at least show some borders outlines, as even for me, knowing enough geography is very hard to pinpoint an accurate location without at least some borders. For others I think some country names, city names or at least some dots for the capital cities would be nice. Or show them as tooltips to not make everything crowded on the map. Still the borders would be very nice or / and some big rivers. 2. With so much space left unused below the map and coordinates fields, it would be nice if the map container would be bigger by default so we don't have to zoom in and move the map so many times. Or at least make the the map container resizable, so we can make it bigger and to save more clicks and dragging that we would have to do otherwise. This is a world map, not a country map so it would be nice to have more space by default. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux/KDE Plasma: KDE Plasma Version: 6.0.0 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.0.0 Qt Version: 6.6.2 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Graphics Platform: Wayland Installed ISO: neon-testing-20240207-1524.iso Fully up to date!
Yeah, it would be nice to add borders and geographic contour like mountains and rivers, especially if you zoom in. Of course adding borders is always fraught because you'll get Indians and Pakistanis and Israelis and Palestinians filing bug reports about which country Kashmir and Gaza belong to. And where shall we draw Ukraine's borders? If we add labels, then using "Taiwan" for the island formerly known as "Formosa" will provoke bug reports from Chinese people. Yes, really! These are actual bug reports I've seen before, not hypotheticals. It's easiest to avoid wading into that mess entirely. :)
Since this is a world map, containing a lot of surface (countries) in such a small place, I always have to zoom to find my country first and then the area where I am in it. And unfortunately most of the map is also wasted by water (oceans and seas) which I guess take about 71% of it and I bet >99% of people will not put their location somewhere in the ocean or sea. If a country is very hard to identify in all that land without mountains, rivers or borders, I bet it's even harder to identify a place in the ocean or a sea. At this point, it would probably be better to have an offline city search, where after the city is found and selected, the coordinates fields are populated, like Stellarium has, I guess that way people living in some cities in oceans or seas, can find the closes place to them. As for adding borders being fraught, I haven't thought about it. As a person that normally roots for the underdog and doesn't like the imperialistic, greedy, invading countries, I would let Ukraine, Taiwan and others as the majority of the people those countries say they are, independent, their own country. But I guess that KDE would not want to take such decisions and design such a map. Though I think it could still use a map with borders, designer by others, like the Political one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blank_maps#/media/File:BlankMap-World.svg Or the Political one with divisions, which is even more detailed and it shows also the regions / counties in a country: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Blank_Map_World_Secondary_Political_Divisions.svg From here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blank_maps Or the simple political map, with borders, colors and labels, that will be the best for people not knowing enough geography: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/World_Map_%28political%29.svg From here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_map Since these are not designed by KDE, but by Wikipedia or their volunteers, I think that the reports of the few people that like to complain about other countries / territories not belonging to them, can be easily dismissed, with an explanation like: "The map is not designed by KDE" or "The map is not designed by KDE, go complain to the source, if you still want to do that". And of course display under it like you do now, the source of it, without the "modified" term so they can see that the map it was just borrowed from some other place and nothing was changed on it. If none of these options are acceptable by KDE, then take these two maps: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WorldMap-A_with_Frame.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WorldMap-B_with_Frame.png From "Topographic world maps" here: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Maps_of_the_world Stitch them together and use the resulting map! I like that this map, besides the mountains, it also shows the rivers, including the second largest river in Europe (the Danube), passing through 10 countries and many cities, including 4 capitals. A lot of European people can orient themselves on a map based on it. I still don't find it as easy as one with borders, but if you decide to not use one with borders, it would be nice if this one was used. If it had also city names, which I assume would not be a problem for anybody, it would've been the perfect non-borders map. But anyway, even without city names, I think it's way better than the currently used one and would great if it could be used. At the moment that's the best I could find.
Outsourcing the map to someone else is a good idea and could help to blunt criticism. Since you seem to be quite passionate about the topic and have already found some interesting and superior maps, would you like to submit a merge request to replace the current map with a new one? The current one lives here: https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-workspace/-/blob/master/kcms/nightcolor/ui/worldmap.png Things to keep in mind: - The new map's licensing must permit this usage - The dimensions and projection of the new map must be identical to the old one, so that the code that maps pixels on the map to latitude and longitude coordinates doesn't need to be adjusted