Show Application Names Instead of Description by Default (Kickoff)
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Description

This suggestion applies to the Application Launcher (kickoff) main menu default widget. It is also valid for the desktop mouse action for "Application Launcher" (whatever this is called).

No other system that I know of does this by default. GNOME has their own applications do something like this but that is because they don't have the ability to display descriptions at all and they only do it for their own applications, not all applications.

It would be much better to have the name as primary and description as secondary because most people know the name of the application and search for it alphabetically.

This is a problem for the following reasons:

  • if you were to have Firefox, Chrome, Vivaldi all installed at the same time the name displayed would all simply be "Web Browser".
  • In Launcher, the applications are alphabetically organized so "Firefox" is sorted by "F" but the label says Web Browser so people could be confused by the sort or the label.
  • in Desktop Mouse Action Menu, this is problematic because there is only one line shown thus the description. This creates a problem so that only the icon can be used to see which application is which.

Application Dashboard and the minimal Application Menu (kicker) have the application name displayed by default which I think is the better option.

Strongly agree. Anecdotally, this seems to confuse some of the "regular users" I support who use KDE Plasma. Users on other platforms are accustomed to referring to apps by their names.

I think we can have the best of both worlds here by using the "Name (Description)" style, which showcases the names, but gives the user an idea of what it does in a smaller, secondary capacity.

michaeltunnell renamed this task from Show Application Names Instead of Description by Default to Show Application Names Instead of Description by Default (Kickoff).Feb 15 2018, 7:07 PM
michaeltunnell updated the task description. (Show Details)

Config gets changed in: plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc

I have no clue (and never had) which is kicker and which is kickoff! So +1 for me for showing the name somewhere -- and also the description. The popups in the icon-only panel (pinned) do show this now.

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