Created attachment 167935 [details] Inactive state of Media Player and Media Player Plus widgets SUMMARY I've stopped using the Media Player widget that comes as part of KDE Plasma, and switched to the Media Player+ widget because I think it's what KDE Plasma's default Media Player widget should be. It not only offers a better, more feature-rich, and customizable interface for wider panels (e.g. a sidebar on the right edge of the screen), but also behaves and looks better (and not buggy) when inactive. When inactive, KDE Plasma's integrated Media Player widget not only displays a large symbolic icon (media-play-stop or media-playback-paused), but also fails to display the context menu (Show Alternatives / Add Widgets / Enter Edit Mode), which must be a BUG. In that state, Media Player+ however not only displays the expected context menu, including an option to configure the widget, but also it doesn't display such a meaningless large symbolic icon in the place reserved for album art, keeping it blank with only a caption "No media playing" below. I hope KDE Plasma developers team takes some action about the future development of this widget as part of KDE Plasma in view of this. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Debian Trixie KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.10 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.107.0 Qt Version: 5.15.10
Thanks for the bug report! Unfortunately it contains feature requests along with the bug, which will make the feature requests not actionable. See https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved/Issue_Reporting#Multiple_issues_in_a_single_Bugzilla_ticket for more explanation. Please take a look through the open feature requests for the Media Player applet and see if some of them cover the features in Media Player+. I did notice you already created bug 472674 for showing control buttons. If there are any other features that aren't already written up, please write up a new feature request issue(s). As far as the buggy context menu behavior you saw when its inactive, it looks like there that may have been fixed. I tested it with a vertical panel, like you show in the screenshot. I made sure no media was playing. I checked 5.27.11 (Kubuntu) and 6.1.4 (Solus) I do see the context menus in both Plasma versions, with Previous, Play, Next, Stop | Add Widgets, Enter Edit Mode On Plasma 5.27.11, with Media Player + installed, I also see "Show Alternatives" in the menu of the stock Media Player applet, as well as Media Player +. Media Player + is not available for Plasma 6.1.4, as far as I can tell there are no widgets that are considered an alternative at the moment. "Show alternatives" won't be available if there are no widgets that advertises as an alternative installed. Please let us know if you still see problems with the context menu on your system. Thanks for helping to make KDE better for everyone.
(In reply to TraceyC from comment #1) Thanks. Yes, I can also see the context menu now (Plasma 5.27.11, Debian Trixie/Testing). But that symbolic icon ("media-playback-stopped"?) is still there. On the other hand, Media Player+ show the last used app icon such as Elisa, Spotify etc. I might come back for creating separate feature requests later when I switch to Plasma 6, and can't have Media Player+
Yeah, all of these seem to be fixed in Plasma 6. with current git master, the panel version shows the actual artwork, not a big icon. Its context menu is normal, same as in the system tray version.