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mvo5 / synaptic

The synaptic package manager
GNU General Public License v2.0
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Give visual feedback while starting #38

Closed sajolida closed 5 years ago

sajolida commented 5 years ago

I'm working for Tails (https://tails.boum.org/), a privacy-oriented Linux distribution which includes Synaptic.

While doing usability testing for Tails or getting feedback from users, we realized how important it was to give feedback very quickly after the user chooses to start an application. The usual mechanism for this in GNOME is to change the mouse cursor into a spinner as soon as the user chooses the application from a menu or from the activities overview.

For example, we've seen time after time people opening the same application several times when its launcher lacked this feedback.

Synaptic doesn't provide this feedback but I think it's easy to fix.

Even when an application usually starts fast, there might be some circumstances when it will be a bit slower to start (live operating systems like Tails is one of them but it might happen on any busy system).

The Freedesktop specification for such feedback is to uses a combination of StartupNotify and StartupWMClass.

See https://specifications.freedesktop.org/desktop-entry-spec/desktop-entry-spec-latest.html