Catching up with various comments that could use a response. It’s been a day of biking in the rain and waiting for compiles to finish. Little bits and pieces of KDE broke for Solaris while I was away on vacation, so some new care was needed. The usual culprits are c99-isms that sneak into the code (gcc is fine with those) and missing system includes (the gcc / Linux headers are more forgiving and will #include things like unistd.h for you). So those are quick fixes once spotted; this could use a little dashboarding though. I’m also waiting for some SPARC builds of the dependencies for KDE to finish.

Anyway, on to responses. Sebas pointed out to me that KDE4 has focus follows mouse. It really does. He showed me on his Linux system, system settings, window behavior, focus, voilá! Which now leaves me with the unenviable task of figuring out why my systemsettings window behavior module has only two icons. “window specific” and “window behavior.” kcmshell4 kwinoptions and kcmshell4 kwinfocus both pop up the same dialog, with two tabs “titlebar actions” and “window actions”; the title of the dialog does change. Regardless of the name passed to kcmshell, I end up in the KActionsOptions constructor and never touch KWinOptions.

So for everyone I’ve ever told “KDE4 has no focus follows mouse,” I take it back. It just doesn’t have it on Solaris. Not right now, anyway.

For SFF things, the focus is on no keyboard (which is common for things like phones and tablets) much more than no mouse (which is uncommon, but an interesting issue in itself). It’s reasonable to file bug reports – detailed ones, explaining which applications, which settings, etc. – when something is not possible with the keyboard. I’m not sure KMail is a good example – it does lots of funky stuff, and I use it almost explusively with the keyboard, except when changing folder properties.

More SFF issues: one of the things that needs doing in order to fix Plasma or other applications is a round of identifying where the problems are (can’t fix what you don’t know is broke, eh). Again, detailed reports are more helpful than “sucks.” This is part of what Marijn’s GSoC project is about: systematically finding and fixing size issues in plasma. There’s no fundamental reason why it can’t work on small screens (as Marijn’s FOSDEM demonstration showed).

I’d also like to thank Shamax for whomping up a pretty nice KDE-Solaris logo in a very short time. Probably fraught with trademark issues, but I’m going to use it for a bit anyway.

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