david_edmundson wrote:We might be at a point where we're at diminishing returns with this plasmoid and we probably want to bring some of the others to this level of completeness.

I think you're right about the diminishing returns. This was just a 10 minute experiment, but I'm sure there's more productive work to be done I'll take another look at the kanboard, seems that you have made some updates there.

myrjola wrote:What do you think? Should there only be one circular design available?

Distraction is what I'm afraid of: since the circular graphs looks like a gauge it might be annoying to have quick and heavy changes. The symmetric #3 is probably the best because it replicates a bar graph. But then asymmetry is usually more pleasing. I would rather choose one out of the three and not offer all options.

I'd also say just pick one, use it for a while and if it feels weird to us or to our beta testers (or to users after release), we can still change it.
It's not a showstopper one way or another.

(Sorry for falling off the earth)

I agree with Colomar; We should just pick one and go with it. In terms of mindset, I'm voting for the asymmetric design. With the Symmetric design you can interpret the widget three completely different ways:

(using the Memory side as reference)
- That the two 'light' portions are separate.
- The graph is 1/3 empty, 1/3 light, 1/3 dark - interpreted as the bar-style graph with a circular mask on it, or as having the sides "mirrored".
- The graph is 1/4 empty, 1/2 light, 1/4 dark - interpreted as the bar-style graph with a cumulative "total".

So yeah, my vote is asymmetric.

On another note, lifting this image from the keyboard layout thread;


If we use circular widgets, should we take reference from the power widget and place emblems inside the circles to visually represent ram/cpu/etc? I know this is by far one of the most polished widgets and that we should probably look to move on, but I felt I'd be neglecting this topic if I didn't bring it up and make more work for everyone.

There's room for it, and it could look nice.

Perhaps we could also drop the labels above the graphs too then - or place the labels under the emblems?

Now that I'm using the Plasmoid in practice, I'm noticing that the visualizing of RAM usage is actually more confusing than helping: It shows memory occupied by processes in darker blue, and then disk cache in a slightly lighter blue.
As a user, however, I don't care about the cache at all. What I care about is whether my computer will swap soon because the memory is full or not. For that, memory occupied by disk cache is irrelevant as it's automatically freed if the memory is needed by processes. Therefore I'd vote for not showing the cache at all, just like the System Monitor or KSysguard do.
Currently, the tooltip also includes cache in the Memory number, which makes even less sense. David has already fixed that in Master, though.

So what do others think? Is visualizing disk cache useful?

colomar wrote:Is visualizing disk cache useful?

I can follow your reasoning. To make it clear that information in this diagram is different from other tools (there might be other than system monitor or KSysguard) I would add a checkbox to the settings "Show disk cache" that defaults to off.

By the way: the plasmoid downgrades compared to the legacy version, IMHO. RAM should use a different color as CPU to make the diagram easy distinguishable. And/or it would be nice to have an individual type of diagram. Right now I have only 2 CPU bars but on a i7 CPU with 8 bars that have spacing and round corners the view might become ugly. (I can set colors myself, and the third bar was swap. Actually I have only one bar for CPU.)

If you're looking for colors to use, remember a more complete color palette is now available: https://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability/HIG/Color

Heiko Tietze wrote:

colomar wrote:Is visualizing disk cache useful?

I can follow your reasoning. To make it clear that information in this diagram is different from other tools (there might be other than system monitor or KSysguard) I would add a checkbox to the settings "Show disk cache" that defaults to off.

To be honest: I'd prefer top just go in without it and no checkbox for now and see if anyone complains. The only reason I see for wanting to see the disk cache is to check if the kernel correctly uses free ram for caching, and that's not something one would want to keep an eye on all the time, so KInfoCenter suffices for that.

colomar wrote:

Heiko Tietze wrote:

colomar wrote:Is visualizing disk cache useful?

I can follow your reasoning. To make it clear that information in this diagram is different from other tools (there might be other than system monitor or KSysguard) I would add a checkbox to the settings "Show disk cache" that defaults to off.

To be honest: I'd prefer top just go in without it and no checkbox for now and see if anyone complains. The only reason I see for wanting to see the disk cache is to check if the kernel correctly uses free ram for caching, and that's not something one would want to keep an eye on all the time, so KInfoCenter suffices for that.

I would say that disk cache is only important when you are running some processes that runs out of RAM memory and you want to know if your swap memory won't run out too, thus killing the offending process. For the CPU's, I'd mostly care about the total usage, to check if my computer has some spare CPU cycles to run another application. To have a per CPU usage, I would add a tick box that would display one pie chart per CPU.

On that though process, I created yet another crude and ugly mockup . On normal situation, the default tooltip would display the combined CPU and RAM usage:



When running out of memory, another pie chart would be added to display disk cache usage.



I added Kver's idea for icons inside the pie charts. The titles could also be suppressed ( if the icons inside are clear enough )

What's about a segmented pie plot for CPU load?


svg: https://share.kde.org/public.php?servic ... 90b02a81e5

(png in cloud cannot be linked here)

psantos wrote:I would say that disk cache is only important when you are running some processes that runs out of RAM memory and you want to know if your swap memory won't run out too, thus killing the offending process. For the CPU's, I'd mostly care about the total usage, to check if my computer has some spare CPU cycles to run another application. To have a per CPU usage, I would add a tick box that would display one pie chart per CPU.

It seems to me that you're confusing disk cache with swap. Disk cache is Linux using free physical RAM to speed up disk access, so it's basically the opposite of swapping

It seems to me that you're confusing disk cache with swap. Disk cache is Linux using free physical RAM to speed up disk access, so it's basically the opposite of swapping

Ah, a ramdisk, thanks for the correction . Well, in this case I believe that it is a too specific use case to make it default. Couldn't it be included instead in a plasmoid showing the current disk space for this partition?

psantos wrote:

It seems to me that you're confusing disk cache with swap. Disk cache is Linux using free physical RAM to speed up disk access, so it's basically the opposite of swapping

Ah, a ramdisk, thanks for the correction . Well, in this case I believe that it is a too specific use case to make it default. Couldn't it be included instead in a plasmoid showing the current disk space for this partition?

It's not really a ramdisk, either. I'm talking about this: http://www.linuxatemyram.com/