I recorded a video and went through the bugs / quirks that make the KDE launcher menu feel so awful.
One that gets me are things that are arguably not matches get loaded, and for some reason are higher on the list.
For instance, when I type “fre” then Freecad is the first result. But if I continue to type “free” then it changes to discord for some reason. I routinely open the wrong application because of this.
Wow, that’s really well articulated.
OT: I find it really hard to navigate mastodon but then there’s threads like these which make me considering giving it another try
That’s wild, I’m on Fedora KDE and haven’t noticed any of these issues so far… Opens pretty fast, finds what I’m looking for. I didn’t see the UI bug he’s talking about with items being misaligned. I must just be lucky.
I get annoyed just seeing all of these spelled out.
Speed is an absolute requirement for a launcher, and if one of the search providers is taking too long it needs to be removed until its speed makes it usable. There’s no way I want to wait for web results if they take between 1 and 10 seconds. The number of local results should always be such that it can be held in memory without being a burden, and return in an imperceptible amount of time.
you can actually speed it up a ton by making baloo only index file names and not file content, and selecting specific directories to index
if I’m on KDE I just don’t bother using it. I just remove it from my panel. krunner is all I need as it can also run commands.
It doesnt really feel “slow” to me but just buggy and like its trying to do too many things at once.
Good points!
