As said in a comment on my blog post: I agree that it may make sense to make the default Experience more prominent than others during selection.
Concerning "directly after installation or later": My current plan is to push the general concept within KDE and cooperate with Chakra to integrate an Experience Picker in Kapudan, because for me it fits perfectly into Kapudan's concept.

colomar wrote:As said in a comment on my blog post: I agree that it may make sense to make the default Experience more prominent than others during selection.
Concerning "directly after installation or later": My current plan is to push the general concept within KDE and cooperate with Chakra to integrate an Experience Picker in Kapudan, because for me it fits perfectly into Kapudan's concept.

@colomar
if you want cooperate whit chakra, going in #chakra-devel and ask george2 the actual develooper of Kapudan

colomar wrote:However, this is not about being able to choose an Experience at startup, it's about whether you allow customization or not. If you don't offer an Experience Picker but allow your students to customize Plasma manually, I think you have an even bigger "nightmare", because people trying to manually fiddling with Plasma settings without knowing what they do are prone to messing things up pretty bad (at least that's what many people have told me from their experience).

The key, in my opinion, is to make a default that is robust (that's why I think it makes more sense to have widgets locked by default), but also make it easy to change if you want to customize your desktop. In my scenario, if students experiment and play around with their desktop, hopefully they know what they changed and how to get it back.

If a few students messes up their desktop, I would be happy to help those students. Curiosity is great.

This is similar to my argument about support. To answer the post on your blog post:

About support and documentation: I find that argument interesting, because I thought that it would actually make at least support easier if more people chose pre-configured Experiences instead of fiddling with the settings manually.

Those who change the default usually know what they're doing. Thus, if I say "click on the application launcher", they understand what I mean even if they changed their application launcher to Lancelot.
Now imagine someone who has not clue what an "application launcher" is. Then I can say "click on the icon in the bottom left corner". With different default workspace presets, I wouldn't be able to do that anymore, since the application launcher in their preset may be located in a different location.

Are your students currently able to customize their desktops? If so, do they do it?

We currently use Gnome2 (no lock-downs or anything). I haven't seen anyone customize their desktop much, at most they have added a terminal shortcut to the panel (something I showed them how to do) or changed the wallpaper.

EraX wrote:And here is a quick example of how the preset window could look like.
Simple list, expanding an item exposes more advanced settings allowing customization of the preset.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/633 ... resset.png

The most beautiful UI I've ever seen. Seriously.

Imagine a first time Linux user (maybe coming from Windows 7 or XP) - chances are that a they've never had to think about partitioning etc..... They've just gone through the installation process for the first time, all of the time thinking 'oh my god, what if I wipe out Windows'. They'll be feeling a little overwhelmed by the end of the installation, particularly on a distro that's 'not-as-user-friendly-to-install-as-Ubuntu' (like OpenSuse) with warning pop ups saying that 'if you make a mistake you'll lose data'.

Maybe display a message after installation saying 'your new KDE desktop is infinitely customisable - when you want to give it a try do this ....' & point to the dialogue of presets for them to play with when they feel like it (i agree it's a great looking preset dialogue too!), rather than having it a choice that they need to make during installation. It might be good to link to a website too of easy step-by-step easy tutorials showing how they can achieve those setups 'maually' so that they get the message that they can fiddle themselves and not feel restricted to the presets!

An advantage of having the 'presets dialogue' available at any time (in system settings?) would be that, if they screwed something up they could just re-load the default layout & everything goes back to the way it was when it was first installed. We'd just need to find a way of letting them know that they can do that & that they can fiddle away to their hearts content - if they mess up they can easily put things back to how they were!

Is it worth having users able to save your own layouts too (is that possible)? Someone could get their layout 'just so', save it, then if they try changes to it at a later date and it turns out they're not happy with them they can just load their saved layout back in hey-presto, back to normal!

Ease of use doesn't need to mean simplicity - compare GNOME shell and the Cinnamon version of Linux Mint. GNOME is elegant but they've made it like that by over simplifying things and then 'locking them down' so the user can't change anything out of the box - Cinnamon on the other hand has got WAY more features and is WAY more customisable but it's still easier to use. Part of that is due to Cinnamon's design so it's do-able to keep every feature in KDE and still present a new user with a friendly, basic, manageable setup. The other reason that Cinnamon is easier is that new users will be familiar with the whole 'taskbar and start menu' layout. Maybe we should keep the 'taskbar and start menu' layout as default to make it accessible & show new users how to make it all funky with docks and stuff when they're ready??

We will definitely push the idea of a UI to manage Experiences, with the ability to edit, save, load, and share via Get Hot New Stuff / Bodega. It seems that everyone agrees on that part, and it should be doable because in the end, everything is just configuration files.

About the selection after the installation: Chakra developers have already shown interest in implementing these features in Kapudan, their first-run wizard which can currently do things such as setting up folders like Documents, Pictures etc., setting the window decoration and wallpaper. Choosing a general setup (Experience) instead would make a lot of sense for that.
Once the underlying system is in place, we'll talk to the Kapudan devs and try to get a first-run Experience selection in place (plus a hint to where this can be changed later) and see how it goes.

asevens wrote:

EraX wrote:And here is a quick example of how the preset window could look like.
Simple list, expanding an item exposes more advanced settings allowing customization of the preset.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/633 ... resset.png

The most beautiful UI I've ever seen. Seriously.

You are not the only one with that opinion. Soooooooo slick. I hope you can make a theme of it

@asevens, @BartO glad you like it Maybe i will one day, but first let's see how the new default look will turn out. Still hoping for an easier way to create new themes.