KDE Plasma prepares crackdown on focus-stealing window behavior under Wayland

> I've just launched the application

I'd even have a special sub-criterion under this: The application may only take focus once it is _ready to actually use_.

Slack is a prime example of how apps steal focus multiple times during startup: I start the app, cmd+tab to something else whilst I'm waiting, and it steals focus again at least 3 times before it's actually loaded and usable.

You can have focus once I can actually do something, not to show me "HEY LOOK I'VE LOADED YET ANOTHER BLOATED COMPONENT!"

I would add "I've just opened this file" which is close to "just launched the app". That requires a bit of plumbing though since it's user interaction with another app which then tells the system to open the file (and hence launch the app for it). It sounds like that's what KDE is doing here, passing the user permission (granted by double click) on to whatever opens the file.

In general I agree that most system access should only be allowed if its an actual user intent through the GUI or whatever. Obviously certain things might be granted exceptions, but the norm should be more restrictive.

It's the same everywhere, and it's unbelievable that it's been allowed for so long.

It's all more or less the same between Plasma/Gnome/XFCE. On X11 all window managers had to employ roughly similar heuristics-based tactics. That does however mean there might be behavior differences based on the specific WM's implementation.

The token-based activation protocol for Wayland is a shared development that has been adopted across different toolkits, and I imagine will probably also result in more consistent default behavior across environments, although of course in theory a given compositor could decide or be configured to whatever flavor of stealing prevention is wanted.

I can't comment much on macOS/Windows technically, except that my standard user experience on Windows installs is that at least once per week, some OEM background thing decides to update something that for some reason requires running a cmd.exe terminal window that reliably steals focus from whatever I'm doing. This kind of thing hasn't really been an issue on Linux DEs for decades.