Let's talk about the concepts of Elegance and Global Coordination as presented in Aaron Seigo's keynote.

In case you haven't watched that yet, see here:
http://home.kde.org/~akademy10/videos/R ... _Seigo.ogv

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Personally, it feels as if Aaron finally pointed out what I've been thinking to myself for ages. This is needed to give the project new impulses beyond the incremental improvements in the particular applications.

If it works, I expect very tangible differences in the feel of KDE software as a whole - and really great material for marketing! It would allow us to give some identity to the individual KDE SC releases and do some really pretentious but effective release announcements.

Also: Major, concerted efforts like this might have the authority to change stuff that nobody else would really dare to touch.
I'm thinking about stuff like (careful! controversial personal opinions following!) horizontally centering all toolbars or maybe finding a good solution to hide those ugly accelerator underlinings everywhere that are only needed for keyboard navigation.

Okay, now I've fanned the hype machine a little. I expect the real results to not be that revolutionary, and in any case creating the organizational structures will take quite a while. But I do think doing this is very important.

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So, let's brainstorm a little. What issues could such a group tackle that nobody else could?

(And yeah, I think a thread like this is more appropriate in this case than everybody opening tickets in the Brainstorm section. If only for the community feeling.)

I think one major thing that needs to be addresses is the Ctrl-M menubar situation. A consensus should be made over whether menubars should be hide-able in all KDE apps or not. The current system of leaving it up to the developer is inconsistent. There is no reason to an end-user why Dragon Player's menubar can't be hidden (which isn't even that necessary to have, since it is a very simple app) whereas Gwenview's can (and it has many features buried in its menubar).

I believe another issue that should be discussed is when features are ready to be displayed to the end user. I've never seen the search bar in Dolphin work. It should be hidden until it works consistently across distributions.

Thanks for posting the video. It was nice to hear a KDE developer speak and have interesting and encouraging things to say. I did not know KDE was so widely used in Brazil, for example.

Edit: Typo.

Oh, for anybody else stumbling over the video via this post:
At least for me the sound doesn't work in the first 30 seconds or so. Don't let that scare you off, the important part has working sound.

I agree with Aaron Seigo about global coordination. Things work pretty good right now from my perspective but I guess it could be even better.

I also agree with Kmetamorphosis. Menus should be hide-able in all applications...

I'm not sure the consistently hidable menus would be a task for this group - if I don't underestimate this problem grossly, it should be doable by a single kdelibs hacker in a reasonable amount of time without touching many (or any) applications. But removing the previous hacks could use the group's influence, I guess.

Getting rid of the current menu concept one way or the other should be a good idea, though. Luckily someone's already working on enabling such things with DBusMenu.

For starters to make kde immediately more elegant would be by removing those useless cashews. In 2.5 years I have never found any useful function except to make my desktop ugly

I agree, the cashews are fine and dandy for platforms that don't know a right click context menu but anywhere else they'll have to go. In this special case I wouldn't put my hopes too high, though - the guy who tries to initiate this "Elegance" effort is also the father of the cashews (or very close to him).

I personally like (and use) the cashew and think it is one thing that adds to KDE's growing sense of style. It is a unique piece of KDE's new identity. However, I think it should be allowed to be hidden. Most everything is customizable in KDE, and it would be elegant if the cashew were consistent with this.

I really don't want this to derail into yet another cashew discussion, but here's my reasoning why there should be no cashews in the default desktop setup: The cashew is basically just a configuration interface. Most users won't ever really bother about Plasma configuration, let alone often enough to justify the visual clutter or the fact that every new user will first be confused and have to learn about this peculiarity of Plasma.

To me, Elegance means to avoid such unnecessarily confusing elements and visual clutter in general.

That's also the reason why I have such a problem with accelerator underlinings. They're not only ugly - an astounding number of users doesn't even seem to have a clue why they're there. For them, they just emphasize how alien that whole computer thing is.

This might simply strengthen your point, but what are accelerator underlinings?

Edit: Typo.

@Kmetamorphosis:
Those underlines in the menu where you can see which keyboard shortcut you could use instead of the mouse.

And of course they're not only in the menu, but also on pushbutton labels, tab widgets, line edit labels, etc.; depending on how thorough the developers were - because implementing them is a good thing, of course. I'm just arguing for hiding them unless the user is pressing the Alt key (which is needed to activate such an accelerator, anyway).