Yesterday I upgraded my Linux distribution and with it KDE to 4.10. Although I like the improvements, a problem that was already bad seems to have gotten worse: Size limits for plasmoids are too big! In 4.10, the "LCD Weather" widget can no longer be sized down to fit my desktop accordingly, while in 4.9.5 it could. Because of that I had to remove it after upgrading.

Why do the KDE devs wish to force some widgets to be huge and not let the user size them properly? Even worse, limit the size of existing ones higher with new updates. Not everyone has the screen space to add so many desktop gadgets at once, and in my case I have to either remove or not use some that would be useful because I can't make them small enough.

I'd really appreciate it if something can be done to fix this problem. I don't mind if text gets smaller or some parts of the plasmoid get a scrollbar due to size, as long as I can fit it in my layout. At least don't add greater limits to existing widgets please, otherwise people have to remove them with each new version of KDE.

In the meantime, is there a safe hack or setting that would allow me to make widgets as small as I wish, and override abusive per-widget limits?

Can you please provide a screenshot of a widget using space abusively?

Please note that in some instances, scrolling a widget is not really an option due to the style of presentation in use, and allowing it to shrink too small tends to make the widget deform (itself a bug) or make the information unusable (also a bug) which is why many widgets use (sensible) minimum sizes.

bcooksley wrote:Can you please provide a screenshot of a widget using space abusively?

Please note that in some instances, scrolling a widget is not really an option due to the style of presentation in use, and allowing it to shrink too small tends to make the widget deform (itself a bug) or make the information unusable (also a bug) which is why many widgets use (sensible) minimum sizes.

I don't have one from my desktop showing this problem, since I don't add widgets which currently take too much space. But several are like that, such as the "System Monitor" widget (horizontally) and the "Weather" widget.

But here's a screenshot of my normal desktop several months ago. It shows my widget layout to the right and the size reference as I see it. You can see where I use the "LCD Weather" widget and how small I had to make it, but since 4.10 I can no longer get it to be as small and had to replace it with something else. Also, to the right I have a list of system widgets (CPU monitor, memory status, drive space, etc). I wanted to use the System Monitor widget there, which shows all of these in one plasmoid. But it's impossible because I can't make it small enough horizontally, so I'm sticking with the individual ones. Then there used to be another widget (some sort of folder bar / quickbar) which I could make smaller, but once plasma-desktop was restarted it would grow back to a larger size so I couldn't save it that way. I think I noticed a few more but they don't come to mind right now.

In this instance, for the LCD Weather Station, I would suggest filing a bug report at bugs.kde.org - it should definitely support a screen that small based on what I can see in your screenshot.

bcooksley wrote:In this instance, for the LCD Weather Station, I would suggest filing a bug report at bugs.kde.org - it should definitely support a screen that small based on what I can see in your screenshot.

Oh, so it's a bug? I thought it was changed on purpose. Sure, I shall do that then.

For other widgets though it's likely on purpose. So if any of the devs consider it, please see where you can lower the smallest size a bit otherwise

It could be a bug, or it could have been done on purpose. From what I see in that screenshot it may simply have been a bug or unintentional regression introduced in ports to QML.

Ok, so today I went through all widgets I consider to have high size limits and filed a report for each (5 in total). In case anyone's interested, here they are:

Excessive widget size limits - System Monitor: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318919

Excessive widget size limits - Weather Forecast: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318920

Excessive widget size limits - LCD Weather: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318921

Excessive widget size limits - Shelf: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318922

Excessive widget size limits - Calendar: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=318923