I cannot explain how much I do not want to see this green dot and “New!” text in my application launcher. Rather than be a passionate contributor like you, I have regrettably become a slave to the Big Tech industry - But one thing I can provide is insight into why operating systems like iOS and Windows have this noise: Impact driven development People need to justify their work on a continuous basis, with the upside of promotions and downside of layoffs. They add the most useless feature...
I cannot wrap my head around the use case of this. Is the attention span of people really this degraded in 2025 that they need to be reminded what program they just installed?
I think the author has a valid point. This just clutters the UI and adds unnecessary mental load by directing your focus to the indicators every time you open the application menu.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against a “new” label in every context but in this specific case it just feels unnecessary.
*edit: If the use case is: Little Timmy installed a new program on grandmas PC and now she can see the new program better I guarantee you grandma will be super confused when the green dot disappears and from that time on can’t find the program anymore. I support a couple of KDE systems with users like Grandma and a dynamic UI like this in contra productive in my experience. For grandma you put the app she is supposed to use in the taskbar as a starter and that’s it. No “new” label needed.
Some apps have weird names and I forget what they’re called. Showing a “new” badge, even if it’s just for the first few times I open the app, makes it more likely that I’ll remember the app’s name.
Thanks for the reply. Forgetting the name of the application you installed 10 seconds ago was not something I had considered. I wonder if this a common occurrence since this literally never happened to me before.
I dunno man.
It’s not like linux applications ever have different app-names in the menu, when compared to the package name you just saw when installing it.
That has never tripped me up. No. Never.
/S
What’s the problem here? I said I had never had that problem before and therefor was wondering if that’s a common problem users might have. So that would make the feature indeed not as useless as I thought.
You can set most KDE menus to show the “Comment” key of the .desktop files instead of the “Name” key. So “KDE Advanced Text Editor” instead of “Kate”.
Packages can come with several “programs” that aren’t necessarily named the same as the package. Example: Calibre installs menu items for “Calibre”, “EBookViewer” and “EBookEditor” on my distro.
It’s not about forgetting…it’ about helping to quickly find what you just installed and what is all included.
It’s more about which category a particular specific software belongs. If a kid installs an educational app/game that teaches programming by giving instructions to a turtle in order to draw a graphic/picture (I think I have seen something like that before). Which category should it be? games? education? development? graphics?
I personally don’t use this kind of menus with categories, I prefer dmenu style launchers where you type to search what you need. But if I was the kind of people that do use this kind of menus I would probably find that kind of indication useful.
You are right, the marker at the category level definitely makes sense to find the application initially.