Hi all,

there is a KDE application called "KInfoCenter" which is basically systemsetting's read-only counterpart that provides information about various aspects of the system and software stack. Most of this data is quite technical or presented in a rather technical manner which makes KInfoCenter lead a miserable existence as a geek tool in my opinion.

A couple of days ago Vishesh and I were thinking of embracing KInfoCenter as a centralized information center about your system. Since the VDG already has presented awesome mockups and ideas for System Settings I'm curious what you guys can imagine for KInfoCenter!

This is KInfoCenter:


Currently it provides information about your processors (right on the main page..), memory usage (also available in ksysguard), basic devices, PCI, IO, DMA, SCI, USB, Interrupts, SMB and network status, as well as detailed information about the XServer, Wayland and OpenGL support. None of this is particularly nice to look at.

Additional information we were thinking about presenting here to make the tool more "enduser-friendly":
Battery statistics
- Charge percentage and consumption history similiar to what Gnome has)
- Device and application consumption ("what's draining my battery")
- Additional information about your battery that don't belong into the batterymonitor or would unneccessarily bloat it
The nice thing is that UPower already collects all of these statistics for us, it's just a matter of presenting them.

Baloo information
Various information about the index, what it's doing right now, etc.

... and perhaps many more in the future Just think of what your phone can already do: Network traffic stats, etc

I hope, once System Settings' basic QML UI settles, we can share some of the visuals and code. I'm looking forward to hearing your ideas!

Good idea!

I think we can keep the basic organization for content (right pane) with trees plus a graphical details pane as in devices. To avoid the 3 column layout this details pane could be moved to the bottom of the content. But all kind of information should use the same layout. Right now devices has a tree with icons, interrupts uses a table, PCI a (collapsible) list view with key-value information, Samba has tabs etc.
I dislike the left pane organization. In particular "Overview" for basically 8 CPUs plus 1x version at top and 2x devices at bottom (in my case). RAM has it's own 'chapter' which is weird.
The interaction at left navigation pane needs double click to open an information but I'd say its rather a selection so you should show details on single click.
Search affects the navigation tree only. I don't think that makes much sense. Is there any use case for search at all?
Export (left most toolbar button) is always disabled for me. I'm missing a copy feature to paste selected information somewhere.

Systemsettings I think suffers the most when it comes to the "Simple by Default, Powerful when Needed" scoring; it's all complex stuff all the time.

Of all OSs' I think Windows does well with it's initial 'overview' showing the software versions, and basic at-a-glance hardware info. We have some in the "About System" option, but oddly we don't use it as the default tab.

If I were to rip it apart and glue it back together, I would first make the 'general overview' page default, and include as much basic info as is reasonable which most people could glance at to learn their details. I would dump the tree-menu on the side and replace it with a traditional systemsettings sidebar, dropping the tree sidebar. One aim would be proper integration into ksystemsettings, since right now it's only the about page visible from systemsettings.

For the individual pages of the info centre, I would divide them into presentational halves and have a collapsible tree-menu for the extra details. The presentational aspect would be similar to the about page, but section-specific. For the tree-menus it would be similar to what we have now.

Designs incoming.