https://chitter.xyz/@ruawhitepaw/117104220877868832

Oh thank god they fixed this! Now I can actually use KDE now!

/j

without features that few people are going to use

Every KDE user has shaken the mouse once just to see how big it gets, this is a critical feature!

The massive cursor during shake is literally what sold two of my friends on Garuda getting them off Windows 😂 idk why I guess the wimsy factor is difficult to account for.

Often times when there was a big new update for GNOME, I'd try it out, decide I still don't like the concept and go back to plasma.

I don't get the appeal of that desktop. Even the tiniest changes need gnome-tweaks? Why isn't that stuff part of the base settings? But ok. You can't ungimp GNOME. The usage concept is baked into it. Fine. But why?

I mean there must be people who want this and nothing else, otherwise people wouldn't use it.

I've never even tried this, but now I'm gonna have to give it a whirl.

Oh my gosh finally! I can enjoy the vector experience! I’ve always felt this was missing from KDE. I would show my friends all the benefits of Linux, but when I showed them by wasting approximately 1-2 minutes, you could embiggen your mouse cursor to absurd proportions, their eyes lit up unlike anything before. They wanted it the moment they knew the potential of infinite cursor sizing.

But I often made the amateur mistake of embiggening a few pixels too far and their delight would rapidly plunge into disappointment as they came to the realization that it was simply scaling up a raster render of the cursor in a lazy post-processed Easter egg.

They all leave the room in a huff, sending my attempts to reach out directly to voicemail, unanswered. But this. This will change everything. Thank you KDE. This is what we had all been waiting for.

If Gnome ran a restaurant, the waiter chooses the meal for you, and tut & shake their head if you try to deviate from it.
If KDE ran a restaurant, if you shake the menu it'll grow exponentially in size until it fills the restaurant.

Yeah, I love just shaking the mouse when I'm bored or waiting for something to finish downloading.

yeah, I have a 65" TV connected and it gets comically large. I wouldn't be nearly as productive without it.

Just tested it - can confirm, does look sharp.

Thanks KDE!

Yeah, I'm sure the KDE Foundation spent this year's entire budget on this, and it wasn't just a fun little side project for one of the many volunteers who keep open source going.

Very happy they worked on this feature. I done my fair share of shaking when waiting to start meetings and it looks blurry. Will look forward for this update.

Because putting QoL improvements and having an effective workflow behind a bunch of plugins that break on the tiniest Gnome update is all part of the user experience I guess. I've given it several tries over the past 20 years or so, but each attempt eventually ended in utter disappointment.

That's an accessibility feature, why gnome doesn't have it? Another idiosyncrasy where they know better probably.

You don't even have a reliable way to keep track of your disk usage anymore. That was the final drop for me when they removed "Other locations" where I could see how much space was left. The Disk Usage Analyzer app is a complete mess and don't give an easy "you got 10 gigs left mate." I had to resort to the terminal to get good accurate measures. Now I have a percentage in my taskbar in Plasma.

Oh, I love KDE. It’s my daily and I have used about a dozen DEs over the past. I just wanted to have some fun with creative writing.

Well, my first thought was also “I need to try it” so they are not alone

GNOME's design philosophy is "we've determined that nobody needs this feature".

KDE's is "we've determined that nobody needs this feature... but it would be really cool, fuck it, we ball cube".

I hate that that feature is enabled by default, wish it asked about accessibility features on first boot instead

The cube thing from compiz had a similar effect back in the earlier years of Ubuntu.

Super useful for if, like myself, you lose track of your cursor quite often.

My conspiracy theory is that it is pushed so much by Red Hat because they have optimized it to be as boring and distraction free as possible to increase productivity in an enterprise context. It is useless outside of that.

I love the big cursor feature. Its great for when I lose track of it.

I guess I'm one of the few people who matches gnome pretty well. I actually appreciate that the default is 90% of what I need, and don't mind if the last 10% is maintained outside of the core project. Scope creep and all that.

Cinnamon looks like Windows. That's it.

Doesn't work for me in KDE anymore???

Edit:
It stopped working because I switched back to X11, it only works in Wayland, but I had to switch back, I think it was because some hot keys don't work and can't be configured under Wayland. Or at least couldn't when I configured my system about a year ago.

Compiz was insanely cool, it was better than anything we have today.

I didnt try KDE and only used GNOME and XFCE, but i guess it's easy and clean side. I immediately get a hold of most applications, and everything feels polished without touching anything. And when i want to get something specific, i'm generally fine with complex tweakings, so the weird ways of finetuning it don't really bother me.

I use burn my windows and desktop cube with Gnome extensions. Kwin still supports many of these effects too. It's fun to see people's reaction.

Some of the effects have become mainstream. But there is no comparison to the real Compiz feel.
For instance the original Emerald windows dresser was amazing, and zooming with the scroll wheel combined with for instance the left win key was extremely useful. The smoothness and configurability of the cube was crazy cool.

What is available today is hollow shells of what we had.
Yes I use wobbly windows in KDE, but Compiz is 100x > Plasma.

I don't believe you. Gnome 2 was pretty much universally loved (hence the existence of Cinnamon, which is a direct descendant), and people were pissed about the tablet-oriented Gnome 3. You'd know this if you used Gnome 20 years ago.

I first learnt about this feature when playing Scritchy Scratchy and shaking my mouse around like a loon to get money faster

I don't really like to talk about it on here because people are very hostile towards GNOME and its users, but I used it (extensionless, tweakless) for about 4 years up until recently. Very comfy and efficient workflow in my opinion. I think a lot of people don't take the time to understand how it works, they get frustrated and want their alt-tabbing and minimizing back. Either way I don't really care. No emotional attachment to any DE, and I use neither GNOME nor Plasma right now.

Me, using terminal emacs: The mouse pointer is generally unnecessary overhead that the user probably shouldn't be using anyway.

I will update as soon as I have found my cursor on my 4k screen.

Well, my apologies for misremembering the exact Gnome 3 launch date. Turns out that was 15 years ago instead of 20. You caught me red-handed sir.

fuck it, we ball cube

This is KDE we're talking about, so it would definitely be "fuck it, we kube".

A lot of software packages have existed across multiple OSes and graphical environments to provide some way to make the mouse cursor more visible, whether via creating trails or a screen-spanning crosshair or various other forms of functionality.

I don't know if that functionality is necessary, but I think that as a lot of people have moved to higher-and-higher resolution screens, that the mouse pointer defaults have not really kept pace. Like, the default mouse pointer size should maybe be larger. On my desktop system, I recently started using a monitor at a higher resolution of 165 ppi, and by default, sway didn't increase the mouse pointer size; I lost track of the pointer multiple times. I wound up resolving that with:

# Larger cursor
seat * xcursor_theme Adwaita 48

in my ~/.config/sway/config file to get a 48 pixel pointer.

I'm pretty sure that most desktop environments have some mechanism to increase pointer size, and my thinking is that the default should perhaps be to try to cover a larger portion of the user's visual arc than is currently the case.

The ideal would be to base it on visual arc...but that requires knowing how far the user is sitting from the monitor. We do have the ability to get physical monitor dimensions from the monitor, which gives ppi, which is part of the problem, but not how far the user is located from the monitor.

Laptops often have integrated webcams, and if their field of view were queryable (which, AFAIK, is not currently the case) that could let one compute that distance to the user's face using a webcam image, as long as they're using the integrated monitor. With desktops or external monitors, though...we don't generally have that monitor-surface-aligned webcam.

I knew the cursor got bigger but I didn't know it would keep growing.

Turned that shot off right away

MacOS does this too, so its not exactly a super whacky plasma exclusive feature

It all depends on the stimulation.

That leaving trails feature was more designed for very old school LCDs with extremely slow refresh time, but yeah indeed it was a feature to help visibility.

I see someone doesn't use multiple monitors.

But hey, that's okay, you do you 👍

Still though, if you ever setup 3 or more monitors, you'll find out that feature is quite useful to answer the question "What fucking screen is the mouse pointer on?!"

Now that I think about it, I should shake the cursor in KDE more.

I have multiple. Just know where my mouse is

Yeah, Compiz and Emerald were the goat!

The gnome type of restaurant is called prix fixe, and it very much exists.

if your cursor enlarges for over 4 hours please see a doctor

I really don’t understand these comments about gnome not being customizable