Sometimes, when you play a little bit with plasma, it crashes or, sometimes, the crash happens when you did a logout and then a login, this particular case happens to me recently adding Milou to System tray. In this situation you must edit manually your configuration files manually to fix the problem or lost all your configuration. Obviously this is a task a simple user can't do.

In this situation, a fail mode, or a method to restore the last running configuration launched when plasma is crashing several times will help common users to restore the desktop.

This idea was discussed in the Plasma Next presentation in Akademy-Es.

I can see a few different ways of doing this, each of them with a different impact for the user:

• We save each plasmoid config up to 20 (20 last changes), if plasma crashes on startup we rollback to the last one.
• We create a new config removing any third party plasmoids
• We simply restore the defaults

Each of this use cases are better than what we currently have (where you have to manually edit the config files).

What do you think?

afiestas wrote:I can see a few different ways of doing this, each of them with a different impact for the user:

• We save each plasmoid config up to 20 (20 last changes), if plasma crashes on startup we rollback to the last one.
• We create a new config removing any third party plasmoids
• We simply restore the defaults

Each of this use cases are better than what we currently have (where you have to manually edit the config files).

What do you think?

Hm, does Plasma crashing on startup actually mean some configuration is to blame most of the time? If not, rolling back changes right after the first crash on startup might be a bit too harsh. Maybe after the second consecutive crash?
In general none of these things should happen without asking the user first. There should be a dialog (which doesn't need Plasma to run) offering the user several, clearly described options. The goal should be to lead users through a sequence of recovery steps from least invasive (but with the lowest chance of success) to most invasive (but most likely to succeed) so that no unnecessary loss of settings happens.