Whoever changed vertical layout of add widgets dialogue to horizontal, can you please change it back to original?

Horizontal layout is inefficient in terms of space and thumbnail names are clipped on both sides making it impossible to see what they are. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the original vertical layout. It does not have to be a narrow strip like the panel settings.

Thanks

Well, the developers decided to change the format (note: format != layout) of the dialog to be more integrated with plasma (and make a more consistent interface - what happens if you lock plasma while the dialog is up) - that is they changed it from a separate window to a plasma component. With that change in format, they also changed the layout to the horizontal layout (probably because it was the most orthogonal to the new format - it seems to fit better horizontally than vertically), though the layout certainly has its pros and cons. One of the cons being seeing the descriptions of the plasmoids as you described, while one of the pros is that the new dialog is less likely to get in the way of your placing new plasmoids.
I suppose that they could change it to a vertical layout along one side of the screen, but I think that a lot of users tend to place their plasmoids along one side or the other of the screen and putting the plasmoid selector along one side would get in the way more often than along the bottom.

Bottom line is this new layout is a royal PITA.

There were a number of problems with the old layout. First, it covered a large portion of the center of the screen, covering up a lot of the area you would want to put widgets on. It was not integrated at all with plasma. It wasted a lot of space with text that isn't necessary all of the time. And the new system provides a framework that can be used by other things to in plasma to display lists (the activities manager in 4.5 uses it), something that would not be possible with the old one.

These are all fundamental problems, they cannot be solved without redesigning the entire interface. And that is exactly what they did to get the new one.

The only specific problem you mention, however (the clipping) is not fundamental, you can fix it without redesigning the entire interface. In fact it has been fixed in 4.5. Another problem, the list of categories, is actually due to a limitation in Qt I think, one that will be fixed when Qt supports it. I am not sure why you think it is inefficient in terms of space, it covers much less prime real estate on the desktop than the old one but displays more widgets at one time.

As I seem to have some problem with the way my taskbar or desktop is configured, the Add Widget bar pops up right above my taskbar. While I can choose the widget category, I can not choose the actual widgets. They are hidden under the taskbar.
If the taskbar were not transparent, I'd be claiming that nothing shows. What I do see is bad: just a couple of icons, no description. Is there one? further down off-screen?

In any case, I'm not happy with this, a minor inconvenience has mutated into a major one. Please, please put the add widget selection back in a window with a frame that can be moved and re-sized dynamically. I thought that was what QT was so good at !

It seems you're encountering some strange bug. What you should see is this.

TheBlackCat:

> In fact it has been fixed in 4.5.

I am not sure what to think about past perfect tense in the quoted.
The latest available KDE in Fedora 13 is 4.4.5 - is that what you are referring to?
The clipping has most certainly has not been fixed in that version.
If 4.5 is a future release, than it should have been 'will be fixed'.

Please clarify.

KDE 4.5 has been released by KDE, however it has not been included in the latest Fedora release at this point in time.

Changing things from convenient to the user to inconvenient on the premise that it better suits developer's ideals is fascist: do as I say. Sad development for a 'user friendly' OS.

Zenith_88, there is no need to use such harsh terms to define a design change, even more so when there were legitimate concerns for the change itself.

Zenith_88 wrote:I am not sure what to think about past perfect tense in the quoted.
The latest available KDE in Fedora 13 is 4.4.5 - is that what you are referring to?
The clipping has most certainly has not been fixed in that version.
If 4.5 is a future release, than it should have been 'will be fixed'.

Please clarify.

You are now in the KDE forum, not in the Fedora forum. If there is anything you need to discuss with Fedora support, please do that there.

Here, the latest release is 4.5.1, and it is a current release, not something that belong in the future. For my own sake, I am running Kubuntu 10.04 and KDE 4.5.1 is not available there either. However, there is an extra repository where i can get hold of packages of the latest KDE SC at any time. So I am running KDE 4.5.1 on top of Kubuntu 10.04 - but that is my choice. I would not be surprised if there exist similar options for Fedora, but I can not say for sure.

Just be aware of your surroundings and act accordingly so you do not complain about things that is beyond the power of the group you are talking to.

Zenith_88 wrote:Changing things from convenient to the user to inconvenient on the premise that it better suits developer's ideals is fascist: do as I say. Sad development for a 'user friendly' OS.

Please recall that you are not the entire world. Just because you do not like something does not automatically mean no one else does.

There are good reasons for making the change, reasons you have not provided any counter for. The only reasons you have provided for not changing it are bugs that have already been fixed. If you wish to provide some concrete reasons why the old method was better, we would be willing to discuss them. But just a baseless assertion like this, especially accompanied by insults, is not a good way to convince people your position is valid.

And it is not "fascist", the KDE developers have final say in what does and does not belong in KDE. That is how all software development, open or closed-source, works. There is no other way it could work. Ultimately someone has to make the final call as to what is and is not going to go in. They can't please everyone, there is going to be someone who disagrees with just about any imaginable decision the developers could make. They have to weigh the pros and cons and come to the best conclusion they can. A single anonymous user telling them "change this because I say so" is not going to convince them, nor should it.

The same goes for KDE 4.5. Just because it is not available on the distribution you use does not mean it is not available. It was released months ago. Not all distributions make it available, but that does not change the fact that it is the current official release, and lots of people are using it.