https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=525038
Bug ID: 525038
Summary: Privacy indicators for camera, microphone and screen
capture are easy to miss: no app name without
hovering, no way to show them outside the System Tray
Classification: Plasma
Product: plasmashell
Version First master
Reported In:
Platform: Other
OS: Linux
Status: REPORTED
Severity: wishlist
Priority: NOR
Component: System Tray widget
Assignee: [email protected]
Reporter: [email protected]
CC: [email protected]
Target Milestone: 1.0
Plasma signals camera, microphone and screen capture in three separate places,
and all three are easy to miss. This is a request to make them easier to
notice, not to add a new signal - the signals already exist and for screen
capture Plasma is ahead of macOS, which has no live indicator for it at all.
What exists today:
* Camera: the Camera Indicator widget (org.kde.plasma.cameraindicator),
camera-on-symbolic, with the list of apps in its full representation.
* Microphone: a StatusNotifierItem created by plasma-pa,
microphone-sensitivity-*, the app name in the tooltip.
* Screen or window capture: a StatusNotifierItem per session created by
xdg-desktop-portal-kde, media-record with a monitor or window overlay, "Sharing
contents to <app>" in the tooltip.
* Spectacle brings its own item with a pulsing red icon while it records.
Two things make them weak:
1. You cannot see which app is capturing without hovering. The name is only
ever in a tooltip. Nobody hovers over a tray icon they have not noticed in the
first place, and this is the same complaint people make about the dots on
macOS.
2. Everything lives in the System Tray. The tray can be collapsed behind the
arrow, individual entries can be hidden, and in a fullscreen window or a game
the panel is not on screen at all. The one indication that something is
capturing your screen is then a few pixels that may not be visible.
What I would like:
a) The app name visible without hovering while a capture is active - a label
next to the icon in the panel, or an expanded state that the item can request
when capture starts.
b) An option to show the indicator outside the System Tray while a capture is
active. The pattern that works well elsewhere is Android 15 QPR1: when capture
starts a chip appears at the top of the screen naming the app, and after a few
seconds it shrinks back to a dot. Google's own reasoning for adding it was that
people do not realise they are still sharing their screen. The moment that
matters is the start of the capture, which is exactly the moment the current
design is quietest about.
Prior art worth comparing against:
* Android 15 QPR1: large chip at the top, one tap stops the capture, screen
sharing ends automatically when the device locks.
* macOS: dots in the menu bar, with the app name in Control Center rather than
in a tooltip.
* Windows: Windows.Graphics.Capture draws a yellow border around whatever is
being captured, which gives the context that a tray icon cannot.
Related: bug 469851 (one red dot per session, so OBS with several sources
produces several dots) and bug 515119 (nothing is shown at all while the screen
is locked).
I am happy to work on this if the direction is agreed - the part I would like
guidance on first is whether an indicator outside the tray is acceptable at
all, and if so whether it should be a Plasma OSD-style surface or something the
tray itself can promote.
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