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As a mostly Windows XP user I have to say that KDE 4 is coming along really nicely so far, and I am expecting to adopt 4.2 once Kubuntu Jaunty rolls out, but there are some things that I think are missing which could contribute positively to the desktop experience (every little bit helps):

• "Open" context menu item in file dialog. In Windows, you can right-click an item in the file dialog and have it shell-execute or open in a new file manager window. It saves having to navigate to the same directory twice when you are in the file dialog and want to perform actions within the file manager instead.
• Ability to rearrange running tasks in the panel and tabs in Dolphin. Windows 7 and Firefox can do it, so why not KDE4?
• No image filtering in zoomed out activity view on generic vesa drivers. It's really slow and feels almost like the system is frozen. I understand that the focus is on the enhanced compositioning, but improving performance for slower systems (and virtual machines) couldn't hurt.
• Less icon spacing in Dolphin, or at least a more configurable icon spacing. It feels like there's a lot of wasted space when there's nearly an icon-width gap between icons, even on the "Small" setting.
• "Tiles" view in Dolphin (example). It's my favorite icon view in XP and it strikes a balance between icon size, number of items displayed, and information displayed. It fixes the issue with the standard icon view (ala Windows 98) where there is little room for the file/folder name. Tiles view fixes this pretty nicely, I think.
• Ability to choose sorting method in Dolphin via context menu. You can easily change the view mode using this method, so why not the sort method?
• Remember which view/sort method is used for each folder. Perhaps it could be stored in .directory or through some other method.
• Classic Quick Access widget, to go along with the classic style KMenu. I'm referring to the applet back in KDE3.5 which gave a classic menu pop-up for each folder, thus allowing you to see more at once.
• More configuration options for the Oxygen theme. Maybe I was spoiled by the QtCurve theme back in 3.5 but I would like a tad more flexibility. Things like smaller checkboxes, larger push buttons, etc. Maybe it's just a matter of taste, but I'd also like colorized window titlebars and menu item selections (having them gray looks boring, I think, and it should look more like the blue item selections you see in places like the file manager).

It's really nice to see a desktop environment striving to be more modern (I'm getting sick of XP) and more intuitive without controlling the user. I'm hoping my suggestions can allow KDE4 to take that extra step.

Thank you for taking time to make KDE better. We appreciate your effort in posting ideas, but since the Brainstorm voting system supports a single voting control, it would be inappropriate to have multiple ideas in one post.
We are closing this idea. Please consider posting them as separate topics.

A lot of the ideas suggested here are already implemented anyway.

In no particular order:

You want, "Remember view properties for each folder".


Tile-like view in Dolphin.


Settings for tile-like view.


The, "View" menu (also notice the, "Sort by" sub-menu).


The, "Open" context menu items.


Sort by taskbar manually (Then you can use good ol' click-'n'-drag to sort the taskbar stuff) (Something else I consider stolen from FOSS by proprietors...).

Tabs in Dolphin and Konqueror can be re-arranged using Middle-click and drag.

Also, you want F4 in Dolphin for an embedded terminal (if I understand you correctly):



That leaves:
The classic quickview widget (The quickview widget being, if I understand, a widget made down-stream by the Kubuntu devs anyway), and;
More configuration options for the Oxygen theme.

There you go. Now you only need to open 2 new threads instead of 9

Madman wrote:A lot of the ideas suggested here are already implemented anyway.

Figures. I think I got a little hasty when I decided to post in the Brainstorm section. ;P

You did overlook on a few key points, though.

Madman wrote:The, "View" menu (also notice the, "Sort by" sub-menu).

But that's not the context menu. The context menu is the menu that appears when you right-click in white space.

Madman wrote:The, "Open" context menu items.

I'm referring to the file selection dialog, not the file manager (that is, when you go to open/save a file).

Also, regarding "Tiles" view and icon spacing, I noticed that you can set the grid spacing to "None", but it seems to have issues when arranged as columns. When you add Additional Information to them, they gain spacing again, for some reason. It seemed like a bug, so I made a new entry on the bugtracker as a wishlist item.