When will plasma panels not get reset with every screen resolution change?

It is undeployable if changing the monitor causes carefully crafted panel settings to be lost.

There are also a few other fundamental issues such as menus opening when mouse is pressed down instead of on mouse up
(and a fundamental issue of erroneously opening two instances if a double click occurs)

and the menu system has icons for unrelated tasks affiliated with the menus.
(I think this is under alternatives, but it is the only system that is even remotely discoverable... the other two options may have a place in the world, but the only one that resembles anything that has worked... basically is crippled. )

I think there is another thing now where custom shortcuts mess up the systems shortcut... It was nice to have a shortcut in quick launch that was a unique copy rather than a pointer back to the system copy... where changes to the quicklaunch to do things like open a direct website or open a browser or something with exact settings would change all copies of the pointer on the entire system... it was messed up really bad last time I tried to deploy a working system.

Just hoping that These things will be fixed... KDE4 and windows 7 remain the only working systems. (windows 8 and 8.1 are flawed beyond belief, and windows 10 requires disabling of updates.. but can be made deployable)

I'd be glad to fund bounties on fixing these huge errors.. I also need to make sure that animations and effects can be turned off easily.

airop wrote:When will plasma panels not get reset with every screen resolution change?

It is undeployable if changing the monitor causes carefully crafted panel settings to be lost.

I'd suggest filing a bug report, with complete description of the problem to bugs.kde.org.
Also, you might give Latte Dock a try to see if it handles that any better.

airop wrote:There are also a few other fundamental issues such as menus opening when mouse is pressed down instead of on mouse up

Do you know of a system which handles menus the way you'd like? How is this interfering with your ability to use the system?
From my experience pretty much all systems' menus work this way, allowing you to navigate the menu while holding the mouse button and then activate the desired item by releasing the mouse button once the item has been selected. (in fact there are some places in certain apps where the menu is only visible while the mouse button is held and disappear immediately once the button is released regardless of if something was selected, thus minimizing the duration of the obstruction)

airop wrote:(and a fundamental issue of erroneously opening two instances if a double click occurs)

I think that would be a nice feature to have: when using single-click, if a double-click is detected then ignore the second click. Feel free to submit a request to get this feature added.

airop wrote:and the menu system has icons for unrelated tasks affiliated with the menus.
(I think this is under alternatives, but it is the only system that is even remotely discoverable... the other two options may have a place in the world, but the only one that resembles anything that has worked... basically is crippled. )

Some more specifics here would be appreciated. What menu system are you referring to: the main application menu (you can customize that to your liking by right-clicking on the menu icon and selecting Edit Applications), the menus for certain widgets, certain applications' menus, all of them? What items are you finding to be unrelated?

Do keep in mind that unlike other desktops, KDE doesn't remove functionality in the name of simplifying things. If anything more advanced or niche features are tucked away in secondary locations; but everything should be where it is because it was found useful enough to be put there.

In the case of the Alternatives menu item on certain desktop widgets, that allows users to choose between alternative widgets without having to open up the Widgets panel, find applicable alternative widgets, add the new and remove the old. Admittedly less useful once you have things set up the way you want, but handy when you want to try different things.

airop wrote:I think there is another thing now where custom shortcuts mess up the systems shortcut... It was nice to have a shortcut in quick launch that was a unique copy rather than a pointer back to the system copy... where changes to the quicklaunch to do things like open a direct website or open a browser or something with exact settings would change all copies of the pointer on the entire system... it was messed up really bad last time I tried to deploy a working system.

You can create your own custom shortcut copies by creating a Link to Application in ~/.local/share/applications/ (or by copying the system shortcut file from /usr/share/applications). You may have to re-add the shortcuts after doing so, but changes made to individual shortcut files here apply only to the references to that shortcut file.