Recently I needed to update my Operating System. As openSUSE 12.2 got delayed I decided to give Ubuntu a shot – everybody either hates or loves the Unity desktop, so I wanted to find out what’s the buzz about it. Interestingly enough, I got more than I bargained for. I got a glance on todays desktop compatibility.
All in all, Cross-Desktop works fine nowadays, but I found some nasty glitches:
- The mouse wheel does not work at all
Why? The Tray specification does not cover the mouse wheel.
Solutions: Implement protocol in KMix and/or standardize by freedesktop.org - There is no KMix volume popup
Why? The Unity desktop treats both mouse buttons the same, and pop up the KMix menu.
Solution: Replace menu by volume popup, as the former only duplicates functionality. - I had to add autostart manually on Ubuntu. On openSUSE you cannot avoid Autostart via GUI
Solution: Implement GUI option for avoiding autostart. Write a user file for autostarting
Posted by Carl Troein on August 30, 2012 at 1:04 pm
Hiya. An openSUSE 12.2 RC 2 user here – I happened to stumble onto your blog when googling KMix and mouse wheel. There’s an annoying glitch that appears to have appeared recently and that I only notice on my laptop (with synaptics mousepad): sometimes I accidentally open the volume slider when I try to touchpad-wheel the volume up or down, and then the slider won’t move no matter how much I wheel up or down or whether I do it on the slider or on the tray icon.
On this topic, and the reason I ended up here: KMix appears to recently have changed its volume step from 3% to 5% for a single little movement of the mouse wheel. Considering that my headphones deafen me somewhere around 20%, I’m not altogether happy with that change. There are KDE-wide settings for the amount of scroll per wheel step, but only for things measured in pixels. So a KMix-specific setting for the amount of volume change would probably make more sense and make O(several) people happy.
Maybe I should go and see if I can find the right place to put in a proper feature request…
Posted by beylix on September 10, 2012 at 9:51 pm
Please see a former post how to change volume steps.