Launchers in an OS have become the central point of access and interaction with system content. It is the main way that most people will interact with applications and files. In recent years, other OSs have become increasingly interested in beefing up their application menus. Plasma currently has 3 launchers integrated. Users are asked to select one or the other by right-clicking in the “start” menu button and switch a different launcher. The interaction is somewhat quirky but it is effective.

I wanted to contrast our iteration with something that might be more interactive, more straightforward and help users find the desired content faster. Here is an idea about that.

Please note that these mockups are just images. The layout, color and interaction is what I am trying to discuss. Is there merit to this convergence idea? Does it solve any issues?

Launchers

Plasma currently has 3 launcher styles added. I believe all of them can be converged or made to look similar. However, given user requests, we have to keep 3 of them and they currently don’t seem to correlate visually. We have the dashboard launcher (WIP), Kickoff and Kicker. Each of them brings different kinds of interactivity and space savings for the users.

I would like to propose a visual merge of these three applications so that they look more cohesive, tight and closer to a Plasma style.

Things to note:

Icons are not meant to be final. They are just a representation Spacing is relative Current elements on the screen are meant to be there

Introductions

Fullscreen button: Will resize from kicker to dashboard launcher, from kickoff to fullscreen launcher. Removed the idea of right-clicking the menu and offered visual controls.

Kickoff Menu: To provide consistency, I preserved the kickoff bottom menu bar throughout the different iterations. This will take care of the category clutter menu that is present in the dashboard launcher.

Things to Consider

I don’t know the possibility of creating this code-wise. I welcome feedback.