this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023
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KDE & Plasma users

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I'm a new user of KDE having recently installed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I'm happy with most of it, but I have one big annoyance: the incessant appearance of tooltips and them not going away when the mouse moves. This is on X11, not Wayland.

I often have windows overlapping or next to each other. When switching windows and moving the mouse, I move over an inactive window to the active one. A tooltip then appears for an item of the inactive window that is in the background. In my opinion it shouldn't, because the window is inactive, but it does. What is even more annoying is that the tooltip will remain on screen, over the active window, even when I maximize the active window. It will be displayed on top of it. It often happens that I fullscreen a video only for there to be a tooltip from an inactive window displayed over it, or a tooltip from the program that spawned the fullscreen video.

The only way to remove the tooltip is to activate the inactive window, move my mouse so the tooltip disappears, switch to the previous window again and then very carefully make sure I don't trigger any new tooltips in the inactive window. I'm not always successful at this, which means I have to repeat this process. This seriously impacts my enjoyment of the system.

I have already tried some solutions, disabling tooltips for titlebars in the System settings/Appearance/Window Decorations/Titlebar Buttons section and unchecking the "Display informational tooltips on mouse hover" checkbox in Workspace behaviour. Signing out and back in and rebooting have no effect. The options just don't do anything, except remove the window preview tooltips from the Task Manager, which I do need to navigate between windows. These previews should not be classified as tooltips in my opinion, but that's another matter.

What are some other options I could try? Even though I appreciate tooltips sometimes to help me learn about this new system, at this point I'd rather there be none at all than having to deal with this annoying behaviour. Ideally I would like to disable tooltips for inactive windows, or conversely only show them for active windows. If that's not possible however, I'd like to learn how to disable them completely since the options in settings have no effect.

Some software information:
KDE: 5.27.8
KDE Frameworks: 5.110.0
Qt: 5.15.11
Kernel: 6.5.6-1-default (64-bit)
Graphics platform: X11

Thanks for any suggestions.

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[–] backhdlp@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Does this happen on Wayland? X11 isn't the main focus of KDE anymore and Plasma has among the best Wayland support.

[–] Thymos@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

I haven't tried that yet. I had some issues with Wayland in a VM before I installed it on the bare metal, so I stuck with the default X11. I'll try it out and report back.

[–] Thymos@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

This is so much better! Tooltips now disappear when the mouse moves, as they should. The only place where it doesn't happen yet is in the application launcher, where they remain when I click a program, but the tooltips don't leave the launcher and since it disappears when you click a program, they don't cover any other windows. I tried all kinds of things to get the tooltips to cover the active window like before, but they won't stick when I move the mouse anymore. Thanks so much! 😌