I've noticed that the System Settings icon and the Run command icon in kickoff (the default KDE menu) are not always visible. This is under the Computer tab in kickoff. Sometimes, one of the other (never both, so far) disappear and are not to be found till I logout and log back in. As I type, the System Settings icon is missing...

Why is that? Is there a fix for this?

Here's what I mean (all three views are screenshots from different times).

I've not seen a kickoff like that in any other distro. Most of us have a search bar at the top. You seem to have a favourites, or maybe last-used section. Could that be what you're seeing? If so, there may well be a configuration option that can be changed.

Haha. By default, the panel is at the bottom of the screen, but I tend to put my panel at the top. Kickoff rearranges the position of the search box and the tabs depending on the edge of the screen the panel is placed against. That's why it looks unfamiliar.

This *is* the "Computer" tab (as can be seen by the highlight in my screenshots). I do have a Favorites and a Recently Used programs section, but they should not have much to do with this problem... I hope.

OK. The red boxes fooled me, particularly as they enclosed the only part that changed. I guess they are there simply to draw attention to them. I don't actually use kickoff - it's merely there so that I can look at it when questions come up like this. On my Computer section there is just krunner above a faint grey line, then Places below it. I use krunner a lot. I'm still wondering if the top section actually reflects either what you use most, or that you used last. Could you monitor it for a while and see if your actions are reflected in its contents?

Oh, I forgot about the red boxes. Yeah, I got the three screenshots over a couple of days, cropped them, stitched them together and drew a red box all using kolourpaint...

I typically wouldn't use kickoff - I rather like krunner a lot more and have mapped it to Alt+Space like katapult used to be. However, krunner in the 4.4 series has become so slow that for most things I do, it's well near unusable at the moment. But, that's a topic for another discussion.

So, I've been monitoring kickoff for quite a while. I can't see any pattern relating to usage. I have already done most of the configuration by now and so, I don't need to use System Settings all that often. Similarly, I use the keyboard shortcut to launch krunner. So, I rarely use either of these two buttons at all. Still, when I need to get to system settings, I'd head to kickoff > Computer and sometimes find it missing and that was kinda irritating.

I can't quite figure out what's causing it and wonder if I should file this as a bug. I thought I should get some feedback on this before I do. Hence this post.

I'm a bit surprised at your comment about it being slow - I haven't noticed that at all. Perhaps there's a factor somewhere that we're not aware of.

Do you have a search box in kickoff? Since you've cropped the images we can't tell whether it's at the bottom, as I suppose it might be if the layout is reversed for a top menu. If you have, typing in the first 3 letters or so should bring up systemsettings for you.

All the same, I'd like to know what's going on here.

Yeah, quite the mystery. Let's see if more users/devs show up...

By the way, the searchbox is indeed at the bottom of my kickoff menu. That works perfectly fine (which basically says that the thread for searching applications has no bugs in it. Krunner is another matter entirely. It needs to launch about 18 threads for any query and understandably feels a lot less responsive. It waits for a second after I stop typing to start its threads. That's fine, but then, there's a period of time (sometimes a few seconds) when the UI basically freezes. For instance, I often see this when I try to use the calculator runner to do simple calculations (as a grad student, I do this quite often). 234 * 5 / ... (pause to read the rest of the calculation off the piece of paper I've been working out something on) ... and it's frozen, searching for "234 * 5 /" all over my computer.

The krunner UI needs to rapidly kill threads if I change the query. It's a question of optimization, I guess. It's gotten a little better now in 4.4.2 compared to when 4.4.0 came out, but needs still more work. Oh well, I'm prepared to wait. Meanwhile, I'll chase disappearing icons instead.

It could be possible that "Run Command" won't be shown if Plasma cannot communicate with KRunner. Why System Settings isn't there constantly, I do not know.

karthikp wrote:For instance, I often see this when I try to use the calculator runner to do simple calculations (as a grad student, I do this quite often). 234 * 5 / ... (pause to read the rest of the calculation off the piece of paper I've been working out something on) ... and it's frozen, searching for "234 * 5 /" all over my computer.

That's strange. I did just that (except that yours appears to have spaces, which mine didn't), paused, then added '4=' and got an immediate answer. Do you really use spaces in calculations like this, or is it just that this occurred when you typed it here?