SUMMARY In the "Show small window previews" click action, if you click an app-icon, then move your mouse to a different app-icon, it will activate the hover action for that other app-icon. However, if you use the "Textual list" click action, if you click an app-icon, and then hover over a different app-icon, the textual list from the clicked app-icon remains. I believe the behavior from the "Textual List" should be implemented for the "Show small window previews" click action. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux/KDE Plasma: 6.8.1-zen1-1-zen KDE Plasma Version: 6.0.2 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.0.0 Qt Version: 6.6.2
Can confirm. There are two cases: 1. When "show preview on hover" is disabled, and the user clicks to show previews, then hover on a different icon, the preview moves to that icon. This is definitely a bug. The hover function is disabled, so no preview should show on hover. 2. When "show preview on hover" is enabled, the same as 1. People might have different opinions on this. But I think hover should also be temporarily disabled when the user clicks to open previews.
1 is definitely a bug worth fixing. I agree that 2 is less clear-cut.
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/merge_requests/3974
Git commit 6d29b6cd16d096b9f5fd76dd08508050348d88b1 by Christoph Wolk. Committed on 01/09/2026 at 08:09. Pushed by cwo into branch 'master'. applets/taskmanager: keep clicked small thumbnails fixed Task manager has the option to show the tooltip on click fro grouped tasks (somewhat misleadingly labeled "Show small window previews", which it does only if window previews are enabled; it shows the tooltips as they are). At present, this setting is not particularly useful, as it just skips the tooltip delay; even though the user has indicated that they want to interact with that particular grouped task, accidentally hovering over another window's grouped task will immediately replace it with that task. We already have some machinery to track the clicked state, but it broke over time, mainly for two reasons: we always replace the tooltip explicitly and reset clicked state, when the grouped task stops being hovered, so when the machinery could come into effect it's already been unset. Then, the tooltip is implemented with a tooltip area, and that will always hide on its own when no longer hovered, and it will also automatically change the visualParent when something starts being hovered (so if the first two were fixed, we'd get the clicked task's tooltip on the hovered task, not itself). To fix this, we (a) stop resetting and updating on hover state change if there's a clicked grouped task (b) re-show the original tooltip if another task is hovered (to circumvent the automatic closing) and (c) turn off the other tasks' ToolTipAreas while there is a clicked grouped task, to stop the re-visualParenting. FIXED-IN: 6.8.0 M +5 -5 applets/taskmanager/qml/Task.qml https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-desktop/-/commit/6d29b6cd16d096b9f5fd76dd08508050348d88b1