The fact that TM entries are draggable outside their panel in the first place is a bit odd in many contexts because most of the time you're going to be looking at apps, not your desktop, and there's nothing you would actually want to or be able to drag them to. So when you accidentally initiate a drag, it will uselessly display the "nuh-uh, can't drag that here" icon most of the time. I kind of preferred one of the original patches from way back yonder that only made TM entries draggable outside their panel when widgets were unlocked (D8564: Disallow drop of task manager icons outside of plasmoid when widgets are locked).

But this implementation does fix the bug (speaking of which, let's add BUG: 390034), so +1 from me since it's an improvement over the current state of affairs and doesn't preclude alternative approaches in the future. Love the title too!

Agreed on master-only.

The fact that TM entries are draggable outside their panel in the first place is a bit odd in many contexts because most of the time you're going to be looking at apps, not your desktop, and there's nothing you would actually want to or be able to drag them to.

I don't think this is odd at all. It's how desktop UIs work. I can also drag tabs from Firefox outside of Firefox, but I can't just drop them everywhere. Drags are globally modal in some sense, as are, say, context menus. There's no concept of "you can only drag within this area", generally, unless you go for cursor confinement, which has a host of other downsides.

It works the same in other desktop operating systems, e.g. in the Mac OS dock.

I kind of preferred one of the original patches from way back yonder that only made TM entries draggable outside their panel when widgets were unlocked (D8564: Disallow drop of task manager icons outside of plasmoid when widgets are locked).

This is not what the patch you like actually did. That patch disallowed dropping things outside the panel when it's locked, but it still, of course, allowed dragging them outside of the panel. It's basically the same as this, except that you need to unlock the panel to drop things on the desktop. I find that unnecessarily complicated and this works better.

In D13274#273076, @hein wrote:

This is not what the patch you like actually did. That patch disallowed dropping things outside the panel when it's locked, but it still, of course, allowed dragging them outside of the panel. It's basically the same as this, except that you need to unlock the panel to drop things on the desktop. I find that unnecessarily complicated and this works better.

Oops, my mistake. I guess that's what I wished it did! Either way, thanks for this. Should make folks happy.