On February, I wrote a blog post entitled “Leveraging the Power of Choice“, in which I described an idea I had discussed with Àlex Fiestas about making it easy for users to choose between different Plasmoids for the same task (e.g. different application launchers, task managers, clocks, …). At the time of my writing the blog post, Marco Martin already had ideas about how to implement the feature, though he said that he wouldn’t have time to implement it before the Plasma 5.0 release. Shortly after Plasma 5.0 was released, Marco started implementation as promised. We decided it would make sense to start a thread in the VDG forum to collect ideas for the UI’s design. Together with several other forum users (most notably rumangerst and andreas_k) we fleshed out the design, which currently looks like this:

Fast forward to today, when Marco announced on the Plasma mailing list that “now the alternatives config ui has landed.”. It always feels great to see one’s ideas come to life thanks to the collaboration with developers and designers. Even now, though, input is still welcome in the forum thread!

Everyone who wants to switch between Plasmoid alternatives easily, look forward to Plasma 5.1!