So after reading Aaron's year-old blog entry again, especially the following quote:

...the log out dialog still has things that look like little push buttons and it still has inexplicable picture on the left, despite now being written in QML and having all the power that implies.

Plasma Workspaces 2 is our opportunity to improve these parts by harmonizing and modernizing them. The log out interface ought to look like it belongs with the lock screen; the log in screen ought to mesh with the splash screen...

We have a couple people who can do this kind of work, but they have lots on their plate already. This is a great opportunity for someone with a flair for design to get involved...

I thought I'd take a stab at coming up with a new design that maybe we can submit to the plasma dev team so they have something to target when their resources permit.

So here goes...









ideally the background would be blurred a touch.

I'll submit it to the plasma dev mailing list if there are no objections here.

No objections at all. You have my full support, 100% and "I wantz it" comment.

Can I haz a mockup for a splashscreen along those lines? (i guess pretty much the same as the logging out screen)

Well here's a very very sketchy wireframe of an idea... will add and remove some stuff

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xt24ay5c444xzk2/test.mp4

jensreuterberg wrote:Well here's a very very sketchy wireframe of an idea... will add and remove some stuff
https://www.dropbox.com/s/xt24ay5c444xzk2/test.mp4

looks really neat, but being the usual pita i'm not sure it's possible (probably yes, but only when compositing is enabled) at first would be probably better something simple that works both in the case of kwin compositing enabled and disabled

Hmm,

I wonder what would happen if we consider the splash screen just a simple login progress screen:



So the states and state transitions are basically LOGIN -> LOGIN PROGRESS -> [LOGGED IN]

The transition LOGIN PROGRESS -> [LOGGED IN] could conditionally use whatever visual transition is appropriate given the compositing capability.

That is a great idea!

The thing I was thinking about was like a simple text saying "blahblah loaded" then replaced by "blahblah loaded" - but this is better. I have no idea why I or anyone would need to know what is being loaded - all you want to see is that it's going and on its way.

Also - this is a technical question - I know there is some trixy magic going on when it comes to loading the desktop. That it loads parts of it first so the desktop looks accessible and then quietly in the background loads the things you most probably wont start first off. Is it a possible if someone, say Marco, could take us through that process?

alake wrote:So the states and state transitions are basically LOGIN -> LOGIN PROGRESS -> [LOGGED IN]
The transition LOGIN PROGRESS -> [LOGGED IN] could conditionally use whatever visual transition is appropriate given the compositing capability.

AFAIK this is planned as well, it may need some work in the login manager, being lightdm or sddm (maybe David knows a bit more about)
perhaps i could fake it by just putting avatar and user name (if i can fetch them rom the splash process) wouldn't be really integrated yet tough

jensreuterberg wrote:Also - this is a technical question - I know there is some trixy magic going on when it comes to loading the desktop. That it loads parts of it first so the desktop looks accessible and then quietly in the background loads the things you most probably wont start first off. Is it a possible if someone, say Marco, could take us through that process?

The desktop shell in plasma next is already a bit like that, we should have a desktop visible reasonably fast, while will still take a while to load panels and plasmoids (final time and weight in ram is probably more, but oh, well :/).
When the startup process will be ported to systemd probably there will be some less important system services that can be deferred to be loaded after the desktop is shown. So yes, that's the direction, we'll slowly get there

Wonderful!

The idea being that you can easily make a list of things people are most likely to do first and simply load them and let the rest putter on in the background creating the impression that the desktop is booted way faster than it really is.
I mean Thomas Pfeiffer (Colomar) and the lads in the HIG have a quaint obsession with user statistics and usage research and it would be awesome to get them into the "what the hell do people do when they start a computer and what is needed to create the impression that everything is running?"

Right now i tried to do a modification of it


just a simple progressbar, and does the usual fadeout when it's done (that's faster because it's kwin doing it).
I know is more sad, but is probably the only way we can have something fast enough at the moment (still does the initial animation, even that one we'll have to test if it can be maintained or not)

Yeah I talked to Martin K about it and essentially we have to create boot -> Login -> Splash -> Desktop sequence that is unified BUT also without any heavy animations.

So from what I could understand the most probably working method is:

1) Boot which is color blocks and whatever the distro wants to add
2) Login Screen with eventual animation before hand
3) Splash without animations preferrably.

My idea was to have the boot resemble the login screen visually and then simply have the login details (user picker, password box etc) pop up after it - BUT that is sadly also impossible as when you install proprietary graphics drivers the boot is crushed and graphics wont work beyond a single background color and ascii stuff (which seems a bit of a gyp tbh).

So the other idea is to have a dark grey boot screen color with whatever the distro wants there on top.
Then the login screen is preceded by a tiny animation where the dark grey fades to show the screen but also shrinks so as to resemble the bar in the middle creating the effect as if the bar grow out of the dark grey background.

Then the login box appears etc etc.

After that we had to cut down on animation and my suggestion then was an animation sequence which let the bar in the screen from Andrews mockup grow and darken again and then fade to desktop after the progress bar being done.

That way we have very little animation, maximum of effect and from what I could understand from Martin K technically possible.

I don't think that we need to worry about the bootsplash (the one before the login) too much. Since the dawn systemd, initial boot is usually so fast that it's barely noticeable. I haven't had a bootsplash on any of my computers for years, and I never missed it. i think login plus Plasma splash is way more important.

Well I notice mine as it is - and tbh I think since it's not a big hassle (just setting a color like dark grey which will be used in the login animation) I think its better to just plan for it.

notmart wrote:Right now i tried to do a modification of it


just a simple progressbar, and does the usual fadeout when it's done (that's faster because it's kwin doing it).
I know is more sad, but is probably the only way we can have something fast enough at the moment (still does the initial animation, even that one we'll have to test if it can be maintained or not)

I think that works great.

Yeah, I wasn't advocating technically removing the splash process. Rather to treat the splash as a login progress from the design standpoint. The main goal was to unify the visual design of these disparate pieces (login, splash, lockscreen, logout/shutdown) and I think this does that quite well. Maybe in time we can figure out how to add the current user to this so the transition from the login to the splash is a little more seamless. Not a show stopper right now though IMO.

Thanks Marco!