Created attachment 177482 [details] How they are displayed now (2K image vertically cropped) SUMMARY The "Brightness and Color" widget and "Power and Battery" widget would be together (next to each other) STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Boot KDE Neon or your Linux distro with Plasma. 2. Look at the system tray area on the task bar / bottom panel. OBSERVED RESULT First it's the "Brightness and Color" widget, then "Most recent device", then "Networks" and finally the "Power and Battery" widget. Like in the attached cropped screenshot. I caught myself a few times going to the system try to scroll over the "Power and Battery" widget thinking the screen brightness is there, then to quickly realize it doesn't work because it's not there so I need to scroll over the other one, which seem to not be close to it and it takes a while to identify where is it and pinpoint it for scrolling. EXPECTED RESULT I expected that these two widgets, that both allow scrolling over them to quickly change some values and that both have inside some sliders and progress bars to be next to each other so when I go to the wrong one, I can quickly move to the other one to do what I wanted from the beginning. Since the system tray doesn't have at the moment a way to manually order these widget icons, I would want a default order like: ..."Networks", "Brightness and Color", "Power and Battery"... So these two widgets are close to each other. Another reason why I want this is because my laptop has loose power connector which disconnects from time to time and I've set the "Power and Battery" widget to always be visible, so with it always visible I would rather have these two widgets near each other. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux/KDE Plasma: KDE Plasma Version: 6.2.90 KDE Frameworks Version: 6.11.0 Qt Version: 6.8.1 Kernel Version: 6.8.0-51-generic (64-bit) Graphics Platform: Wayland ADDITIONAL INFORMATION Hardware: Dell Inspiron 5770 Graphics Processor 1: Mesa Intel® UHD Graphics 620 Graphics Processor 2: AMD Radeon R5 M465 Series
I actually had the same thought, that these two widgets would be logical to have next to each other, since when a laptop user wants to maximize battery life or power, they often use both widgets. I think this is a reasonable default
I agree with the case where I would want to maximize the battery life too. There I would go to one of them and scroll down to the value I want or until the end. And then I would move to the other one to do the same thing. Which will take a bit of time, so it would be better if I was not wasting time to find the other one, especially the "Brightness and Color" one which made me lose a bit of time a few times as I forgot that it looks different at night, while I was searching for the "Sun" icon. So it's best to have them one next to the other. for that too.
Right now tray widgets are grouped by type, and within groups, are ordered alphabetically. I bet you can see where this is going, right? Positioning these two widgets next to each other by default would require one of the following three options: 1. Abandoning alphabetical ordering and having a hardcoded ordering, as in System Settings' sidebar 2. Giving both widgets names that happen to position them next to one another alphabetically 3. Supporting non-square widgets so both icons can be adjacent in a single widget 3 is basically a rewrite of the whole widget, and effectively eliminates the grid option, leaving only rows and columns. Huge task, unclear reward, would definitely gather complaints due to removing a feature. I don't think this is feasible right now. 2 is likewise not feasible but due to translation; we can't guarantee that the names would always be in sequential alphabetical order in every language. That leaves 1, which requires abandoning alphabetical ordering within groups in favor of a KDE-determined custom order. For 1st-party widgets, we can do that and ensure these two widgets are always adjacent. But what happens when 3rd-party widgets or tray icons for apps are added to the mix? The beautiful hand-curated ordering would get destroyed by random widgets going in random places. System Settings already has this problem, but it's not much of an issue in practice since 3rd-party KCMs are fairly rare. However 3rd-party system tray widgets and icons are common Thus, I'm not sure this is feasible to do, unfortunately. The only way I can see this being possible is if we offer a feature to opt out of grouping by allowing manual re-arrangement. Then you can move the icons to be adjacent to one another yourself, and any new ones will just appear at the end of the list and you have to move it to where you want yourself. That's already tracked at Bug 384782.