So, my task bar pops up saying that one of my 10's of windows has something so important that it has to interfere with my work until I've looked at the window. I activate each window, but no luck. I fire up a new window that will be equally demanding and then close it. No luck. Likely, there is a window with some stupid advertisement that keeps telling KDE that it is more important than anything else, and KDE obliges. This, I know, because I also run this script:

Code: Select all

kbuildsycoca4
sleep 1
kquitapp plasma-desktop
sleep 1
kstart plasma-desktop

and the task bar will not go away.

It is an egregious bug to allow ANY application to be insistent for more than a second or two, and certainly a bug to allow one application to keep insisting over and over and over and over and over again.

Should this be filed as a bug, or would KDE folks mark it another case of

WONTFIX

Have you had a look at systemsettings - window behaviour - focus stealing prevention?

Is "extreme" high enough? I've posted on this before: It needs to be "absolutely, positively never ever under any circumstances", but that setting is not available. Only "extreme".

To tell you the truth, I find these double negatives quite confusing and have always opted for the other end of the scale - never had a problem with annoying pop-ups.

Give it a go.

I learned of setting focus stealing prevention when I was finding that some window wanting attention would not only steal my keystrokes yielding "I agree to your request" responses to windows I have not seen, but it would also yank me from my current desk top to where ever in heck the demanding window was. So, "extreme" is correct and "always, without fail" is not really available. Thanks, though.
[url]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stealing[/url]

I stand corrected, thank you

You are welcome. Meanwhile, I've still got this blasted task bar covering up the bottoms of my shell windows, even though I've closed down and re-opened all my applications and I've run that script noted above. No luck. I haven't rebooted the machine yet. Maybe that is what is necessary. Whoever designed this task bar pop-up feature needs to think a little bit about "allowing" users to make it go back into hiding....

Which version do you use? For me the panel goes back to hiding after showing that a task needs attention (4.6.2 here).

You can also try Smooth Tasks - here it doesn't show the panel at all when a task requires attention. Unfortunately I don't know how well the version I linked to works in 4.6.x, but for e.g. Arch there's a 4.6 version in AUR.

Hans wrote:Which version do you use?

KDE Platform Version 4.6.00 "release 6"

For me the panel goes back to hiding after showing that a task needs attention (4.6.2 here).

Perfect. Exactly the way it is supposed to behave. Not the 4.6.0 behavior, though. I will now go look at "Smooth Tasks" to see what I can see.

[Just visited the page. Too complicated for me. I really want to be a naive user. I want things to hide when I've told them to go hide and I do not want to learn all about plasmoids (whatever they are) just to make my task bar hide. I do not think that too much to ask.]

Oh, wait, I just noticed: I fired up Kontact for kicks and right afterward the task bar became willing to hide itself again. Whew!! I'll still bookmark Smooth Tasks for the next time this happens. (Were this the first occasion, I'd not have spent so much time here.)

This is a known bug. A fix is upcoming.

Smooth Tasks is an alternative task manager with a lot more options than the standard one. If you're happy with the standard task manager except for this bug, I would recommend to just wait for the fix.

As said I don't think Smooth Tasks officially supports 4.6 yet. The easiest way to install it is usually through your package manager, depending on which distribution you use. You then need to add it to your panel and remove the standard task manager. A guide for how to do that can be found here: http://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/HowTo

How long before there is a fix?

Every time I send an email with Thunderbird or use the Insight (Tcl) debugger, the task bar pops up and covers my windows and the only way to stop it is to abort an email or kill plasma-desktop. Is anyone going to fix this any time soon? Thank you.