linuxmemes

Yeah, I'm sure the KDE Foundation spent this year's entire budget on this, and it wasn't just a fun little side project for one of the many volunteers who keep open source going.

MacOS does this too, so its not exactly a super whacky plasma exclusive feature

A lot of software packages have existed across multiple OSes and graphical environments to provide some way to make the mouse cursor more visible, whether via creating trails or a screen-spanning crosshair or various other forms of functionality.

I don't know if that functionality is necessary, but I think that as a lot of people have moved to higher-and-higher resolution screens, that the mouse pointer defaults have not really kept pace. Like, the default mouse pointer size should maybe be larger. On my desktop system, I recently started using a monitor at a higher resolution of 165 ppi, and by default, sway didn't increase the mouse pointer size; I lost track of the pointer multiple times. I wound up resolving that with:

# Larger cursor
seat * xcursor_theme Adwaita 48

in my ~/.config/sway/config file to get a 48 pixel pointer.

I'm pretty sure that most desktop environments have some mechanism to increase pointer size, and my thinking is that the default should perhaps be to try to cover a larger portion of the user's visual arc than is currently the case.

The ideal would be to base it on visual arc...but that requires knowing how far the user is sitting from the monitor. We do have the ability to get physical monitor dimensions from the monitor, which gives ppi, which is part of the problem, but not how far the user is located from the monitor.

Laptops often have integrated webcams, and if their field of view were queryable (which, AFAIK, is not currently the case) that could let one compute that distance to the user's face using a webcam image, as long as they're using the integrated monitor. With desktops or external monitors, though...we don't generally have that monitor-surface-aligned webcam.

I don't really like to talk about it on here because people are very hostile towards GNOME and its users, but I used it (extensionless, tweakless) for about 4 years up until recently. Very comfy and efficient workflow in my opinion. I think a lot of people don't take the time to understand how it works, they get frustrated and want their alt-tabbing and minimizing back. Either way I don't really care. No emotional attachment to any DE, and I use neither GNOME nor Plasma right now.

GNOME used to be good until version 2. Then the developers went insane and all subsequent versions of GNOME feel like they've been designed by someone who has never worked in his life.

I guess I'm one of the few people who matches gnome pretty well. I actually appreciate that the default is 90% of what I need, and don't mind if the last 10% is maintained outside of the core project. Scope creep and all that.

Because putting QoL improvements and having an effective workflow behind a bunch of plugins that break on the tiniest Gnome update is all part of the user experience I guess. I've given it several tries over the past 20 years or so, but each attempt eventually ended in utter disappointment.

You don't even have a reliable way to keep track of your disk usage anymore. That was the final drop for me when they removed "Other locations" where I could see how much space was left. The Disk Usage Analyzer app is a complete mess and don't give an easy "you got 10 gigs left mate." I had to resort to the terminal to get good accurate measures. Now I have a percentage in my taskbar in Plasma.

I didnt try KDE and only used GNOME and XFCE, but i guess it's easy and clean side. I immediately get a hold of most applications, and everything feels polished without touching anything. And when i want to get something specific, i'm generally fine with complex tweakings, so the weird ways of finetuning it don't really bother me.

My conspiracy theory is that it is pushed so much by Red Hat because they have optimized it to be as boring and distraction free as possible to increase productivity in an enterprise context. It is useless outside of that.

I was gonna say the same thing, lol. It's very helpful.

Because GNOME used to be good (version 2) and then they decided to fuck it up forever.

I see someone doesn't use multiple monitors.

But hey, that's okay, you do you 👍

Still though, if you ever setup 3 or more monitors, you'll find out that feature is quite useful to answer the question "What fucking screen is the mouse pointer on?!"

In my case I love that it's enabled by default. Would have never ocurred to me to turn it on, but love the sillynes of it.