Icon for wireless is very poor

[Jithin Emmanuel]

Binary package hint: plasma-widget-networkmanagement

This is not a functionality issue, more of a usability one. Please see my attached screen shot. The icon when set against a transparent background is too vague. The signal strength displayed on top of it makes it look worse.

It would be better to have an icon which will be clear in transparent background also.

[Jonathan Thomas (echidnaman)]

Thank you for your bug report. This bug has been reported to the developers of the software. You can track it and make comments at: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201483

[Adam Porter (alphapapa)]

The icon is still quite poor in Lucid. Here are some notable problems:

1. It's not the least bit obvious that it represents wireless networking at all. It has neither vertical nor arched signal bars, both of which are standard on both laptops and cell phones.

2. The little square black and white icon in the lower left corner, which seems to change with connection status, is so small that even though I know it has something to do with status, I can't tell what it means. It's useless.

3. The colors make the signal bar difficult to read, even though I know what it is.

Please, for goodness' sake, just use the one that GNOME is using in Ubuntu. It's perfectly clear, it looks pleasant, and it looks standard. Even the KNetworkManager in 8.04 Hardy was perfectly clear and pleasant, but this one in Lucid is awful.

[Dhaval Patel (dhuv)]

I second Adam's suggestions in comment #3.

[Adam Porter (alphapapa)]

This seems to be mostly resolved in Maverick. The only thing left is the little square icon in the lower right corner that shows connection status or progress, which is the same unreadable, useless one from before. I am actually a big fan of the way the GNOME NM applet icon shows status and progress--I wish it could be ported to KDE.

[Dhaval Patel (dhuv)]

I am running Natty and it seems to be fixed there. I see a progress bar and can easily spot the signal strength with a quick glance.

[Adam Porter (alphapapa)]

There is a confusing situation in Natty: there are two packages that provide similar functionality and have identical version strings but are slightly different: network-manager-kde and plasma-widget-networkmanagement. It seems like network-manager-kde is deprecated and doesn't integrate with Plasma as well. It also has the confusing, tiny emblem in the lower-right corner of the icon.

I think network-manager-kde should be replaced with a transitional package that moves people to plasma-widget-networkmanagement. The potential problem there is that, after installing that package, it may not be selected by default in the System Tray settings, so it might not be visible in the tray by default, and it's not obvious how to enable it, especially if a user doesn't know his way around Plasma. The result then could be that the user can't figure out how to use wifi, or thinks the only way is through System Settings. Maybe the Plasma System Tray could be patched to enable the networkmanagement widget by default if it hasn't been explicitly disabled.

Whatever is done, I think this conflict or transition will become a bigger, more confusing issue in the future for average users if it's not handled gracefully.