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I'm fed up with seeing reviews from people complaining that KDE Plasma Workspaces is "overwhelming" etc. Most of this boils down to one thing: that the out of the box experience in most KDE distros is in a mode to customise the UI, and that many reviewers (who really should know better before posting reviews) are ignorant of the fact that "lock widgets" removes a lot of this clutter instantly.


This default behaviour makes no sense in several scenarios. E.g.:
- a new inexperienced user does not want to be overwhelmed with information, and wants to launch a few programs; fiddling with the GUI is something they will do more gradually over time as they learn, not something they need out of the box. A new user is also likely to make a mess of their desktop by accidentally moving things around.
- a business user who just needs to do a few tasks to get his job done, and does not have the time to be fiddling with widgets. He might even be logging into a remote server where customisation is no interest to him.


It therefore makes no sense to have widgets unlocked by default. I think the Linux community is more than aware nowadays of how incredibly powerful, modular and customisable KDE is, and it is no longer necessary to highlight this by shoving it in users' faces at first boot. There is a reason why Microsoft locks the taskbar by default on Windows!

If you locked widgets by default then perhaps you could also show some sort of information dialogue when a user unlocks widgets for the fist time to explain, and perhaps with a tutorial on customisation (and no doubt numerous 3rd party guides would appear on customisation as KDE becomes more popular).



Last but not least, you need to make this change because Linus says so!:
http://www.muktware.com/4739/linus-torv ... ure-things

the default widget/plasmoid behavior with mouse-over pretty much immediately showing the controls for it annoys the hell of me. You can lock the widgets down and they calm down and act normal, but it's some really odd and distracting default behavior.

You do NOT want to **** Linus off now :

It should be locked by default, yes.