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I was thinking that a good idea would be to let the user choose a default wallpaper for his KDE desktop, in case the wallpaper he uses is not able to load. For example, I use Weather as my wallpaper setting and when there is no Internet connection I just get an ugly plain blue color as a wallpaper. It would be much nicer if instead of this I could have had a proper wallpaper. What do you think?

Cheers,
Jack

I wouldn't call it default wallpaper, but fallback wallpaper or similar instead, but I like the idea of having a wallpaper (or several) to show when another is not avaliable, being it weather one or any other.

Someone is implementing caching for plasma information, which means in the event that you have no internet connection, online components will just use the last good value. Once this is implemented, when there is no internet connection the weather desktop will show the wallpaper corresponding to the last retrieved weather data. So you won't have the blank background anymore. I think that is a better approach since the user does not need to do anything, it is entirely automatic.

TheBlackCat wrote:Someone is implementing caching for plasma information, which means in the event that you have no internet connection, online components will just use the last good value. Once this is implemented, when there is no internet connection the weather desktop will show the wallpaper corresponding to the last retrieved weather data. So you won't have the blank background anymore. I think that is a better approach since the user does not need to do anything, it is entirely automatic.

Well this is not a bad idea, but having a different wallpaper when there is no Internet, is also a good way of knowing that there is no connection and also using a custom wallpaper in a no-connection situation is good because you will not have to stick with the wallpaper of the previous weather condition. What about letting the user select what happens in case of a faulty connection?

I suppose that is a possibility, but in my opinion the use case is too small to add yet another configuration option. We need to balance the benefits to user with the added complexity of the configuration dialogs, and I don't think this adds enough benefit compared to caching to justify another configuration dialog.

Also, I am not sure it is even possible to implement this in a global manner. Wallpaper generators would need some way to report back to plasma that they don't have a wallpaper, then plasma would need to change to a different wallpaper generator until the original one has a wallpaper, then change back. It could be implemented individually for wallpapers that need it, but I am not sure a global setting would be feasible.

Oh, one more reason to use a different wallpaper than the one used during the last time there was a connection: what if someone sets his wallpaper type to weather when there is no connection? But anyway if there is an easier way to store the last wallpaper used than to have a default one in case of problems, I guess this should be done as it is not such a big issue.