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I’ll be happy when the cursor can be inverted color like windows.
Good news: The feature you want has been a part of KDE since forever. Cursors are fully customizable with different cursor packs being available. Installing a cursor pack is very simple, just look through the different packs, select the one you want and click install. There’s so many different kinds available, one is probably to your liking. And if it isn’t you can probably find an artist easily enough and commission your own set.
I put my finger under the mouse and it jitters automatically, makes it easy to get the mouse huge so I’m glad they’re thinking of users like me.
I will update as soon as I have found my cursor on my 4k screen.
wait what this is a thing? brb
without features that few people are going to use
Every KDE user has shaken the mouse once just to see how big it gets, this is a critical feature!
I use it probably ten times a day!
I sometimes do it at work out of boredom
I did it often until i learned it crashes some games :(
I knew the cursor got bigger but I didn’t know it would keep growing.
It all depends on the stimulation.
if your cursor enlarges for over 4 hours please see a doctor
yeah, I have a 65" TV connected and it gets comically large. I wouldn’t be nearly as productive without it.
Now that I think about it, I should shake the cursor in KDE more.
I’ve never even tried this, but now I’m gonna have to give it a whirl.
Super useful for if, like myself, you lose track of your cursor quite often.
Doesn’t work for me in KDE anymore???
Edit:
It stopped working because I switched back to X11, it only works in Wayland, but I had to switch back, I think it was because some hot keys don’t work and can’t be configured under Wayland. Or at least couldn’t when I configured my system about a year ago.The secret reason Wayland is superior.
Unfortunately I had to switch back to X11 because Plasma on Wayland lacked a feature I need.
If Gnome ran a restaurant, the waiter chooses the meal for you, and tut & shake their head if you try to deviate from it.
If KDE ran a restaurant, if you shake the menu it’ll grow exponentially in size until it fills the restaurant.The gnome type of restaurant is called prix fixe, and it very much exists.
That type of restaurant tends to be among the best in the world.
Which makes sense. If each day you offer one choice you can make that one really good.
But for someone who doesn’t like that specific food it doesn’t work. They’d prefer having different options.
Kind of similar with gnome and KDE.
If Gnome ran a restaurant, the waiter chooses the meal for you, and tut & shake their head if you try to deviate from it.
And if you want to add salt and pepper to your meal, there’s a convenient store across the street that sells salt and pepper shakers. No, the Gnome restaurant will not be providing them.
GNOME’s design philosophy is “we’ve determined that nobody needs this feature”.
KDE’s is “we’ve determined that nobody needs this feature… but it would be really cool, fuck it, we
ballcube”.“we’ve determined that nobody needs this feature”
How? Trust me bro! Users hate features, they get all confused and stuff. That’s why nobody should ever choose anything, the OS should just be shit forever. We also get paid by Microsoft and IBM coincidentally.
Well who needs systrays anyways? While we’re at it, let’s remove theming support too! Surely nobody would miss that feature?
I really miss KDE. Sadly my experience with new major versions (5, 6) tends to be that plasma is unstable for daily use for at least a year or two. I’ll be back once things settle down a bit.
Plasma 6 has been nothing but great for me! Not a single crash ever since it released. It’s nothing like the beginning of Plasma 5
fuck it, we
ballcubeThis is KDE we’re talking about, so it would definitely be “fuck it, we kube”.
The massive cursor during shake is literally what sold two of my friends on Garuda getting them off Windows 😂 idk why I guess the wimsy factor is difficult to account for.
The cube thing from compiz had a similar effect back in the earlier years of Ubuntu.
Compiz was insanely cool, it was better than anything we have today.
We still have Compiz today, you can still run it.
Thanks and yes I know.
But AFAIK it was mostly limited to Ubuntu Unity and XFCE for a long time, and support became shaky.
I actually looked it up just before, and it seems Mint has support for it, but looking at the emerald themes it looks nothing like it did back in the day where it was new and revolutionizing. Also I’m lazy, I don’t care to fiddle so much with my computer anymore.
I use burn my windows and desktop cube with Gnome extensions. Kwin still supports many of these effects too. It’s fun to see people’s reaction.
Some of the effects have become mainstream. But there is no comparison to the real Compiz feel.
For instance the original Emerald windows dresser was amazing, and zooming with the scroll wheel combined with for instance the left win key was extremely useful. The smoothness and configurability of the cube was crazy cool.What is available today is hollow shells of what we had.
Yes I use wobbly windows in KDE, but Compiz is 100x > Plasma.Writing fire on the desktop and window animations like burn up on exit were also awesome.
KDE cube always feels like watching a b-movie version starwars. Nailed the wobbly windows though.
Compiz and cairo-dock is peak nostalgic linux for me. Tux surfing around the dock and all.
Oh boy I’m getting all nostalgic, it’s 20 years ago it came out now!
Yeah, Compiz and Emerald were the goat!
Yeah, I love just shaking the mouse when I’m bored or waiting for something to finish downloading.
Sometimes I jiggle the mouse just to see how big I can make it
Well, my first thought was also “I need to try it” so they are not alone
I really don’t understand these comments about gnome not being customizable
Because it isn’t? Can you even move elements in the top panel?
Then you either haven’t used GNOME or haven’t used KDE. It’s uh, it’s not something that’s hard to miss as far as differences go.
Oh my gosh finally! I can enjoy the vector experience! I’ve always felt this was missing from KDE. I would show my friends all the benefits of Linux, but when I showed them by wasting approximately 1-2 minutes, you could embiggen your mouse cursor to absurd proportions, their eyes lit up unlike anything before. They wanted it the moment they knew the potential of infinite cursor sizing.
But I often made the amateur mistake of embiggening a few pixels too far and their delight would rapidly plunge into disappointment as they came to the realization that it was simply scaling up a raster render of the cursor in a lazy post-processed Easter egg.
They all leave the room in a huff, sending my attempts to reach out directly to voicemail, unanswered. But this. This will change everything. Thank you KDE. This is what we had all been waiting for.
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.
Oh, I love KDE. It’s my daily and I have used about a dozen DEs over the past. I just wanted to have some fun with creative writing.
I love the big cursor feature. Its great for when I lose track of it.
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 48in 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.
That leaving trails feature was more designed for very old school LCDs with extremely slow refresh time, but yeah indeed it was a feature to help visibility.
That leaving trails feature was more designed for very old school LCDs with extremely slow refresh time,
It’s true that there was an type of early LCDs that had very slow response rates and that that produced a visual artifact, a visible trail behind the pointer (as well as ghosting behind anything moving). I’ve used those displays. But that’s not what I’m talking about. There was also software that explicitly drew pointer trails to make the pointer more visible.
searches
MacOS does this too, so its not exactly a super whacky plasma exclusive feature
Often times when there was a big new update for GNOME, I’d try it out, decide I still don’t like the concept and go back to plasma.
I don’t get the appeal of that desktop. Even the tiniest changes need gnome-tweaks? Why isn’t that stuff part of the base settings? But ok. You can’t ungimp GNOME. The usage concept is baked into it. Fine. But why?
I mean there must be people who want this and nothing else, otherwise people wouldn’t use it.
For me it kinda always went something like this:
“Hey can I have window labels on my taskbar? And maybe quicklaunch. Also can I type in paths in the file manager?”
KDE: “Sure no prob.”
GNOME: “You are an enemy of Christ.”
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.
I use neither GNOME nor Plasma right now.
What do you use currently? I’ve been using GNOME for a few years now, but I like to try new things (then switch back to GNOME, naturally.)
Currently using niri. It’s not easy to explain, but you could say it takes GNOME’s concept of infinite horizontal workspaces and applies it to individual windows.
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.
I don’t believe you. Gnome 2 was pretty much universally loved (hence the existence of Cinnamon, which is a direct descendant), and people were pissed about the tablet-oriented Gnome 3. You’d know this if you used Gnome 20 years ago.
I used gnome then, when Ubuntu would send you free CDs and GNOME was poo-flavoured. It was harder to set things up then, and I kind of see why people gave up and used some hack of the windowing kit from GIMP. Much has happened it 20 years though. KDE got worse (imho, but we have Trinity), GNOME stayed worse, and Linux became easy and mainstream.
Well, my apologies for misremembering the exact Gnome 3 launch date. Turns out that was 15 years ago instead of 20. You caught me red-handed sir.
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.
It’s useful for finding the mouse when you have multiple screens (more than 3)
I was gonna say the same thing, lol. It’s very helpful.
Very happy they worked on this feature. I done my fair share of shaking when waiting to start meetings and it looks blurry. Will look forward for this update.
That’s an accessibility feature, why gnome doesn’t have it? Another idiosyncrasy where they know better probably.
