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One of the strengths of Plasma and KDE is that you can get it to work almost however you want, but the problem is that it’s usually hard to achieve that. You either have to know exactly what to do, or you have to browse options and settings to find what you want.
This is a problem for new users of KDE, and especially a problem for people who are not very tech savvy. A new User might not even know what is possible.

So I’d suggest to have multiple defaults supported by Plasma and have a Selector that auto-launches on the first login. There you could have options like Default KDE, Windows like options (with double click), Mac OS like with bar on top, defaults for impaired vision &c.
One could probably even do this with a live preview, so that selecting an option temporarily changes the desktop.
Another way to do it would be an Assistant with guided steps (like one step "Where do you want your bar be?", one step "how should the bar look?", one step for Single click/double click and similar stuff, ...).

I think this would be very beneficial to offering new users a pleasant start (especially if you have users that have limited vision or control, because we cannot expect them to crawl through option to make a desktop usable), but it would also benefit experienced users, for they would need less effort to get a new desktop the way they like it to be.

Why don't you use Activities for this? Seems to me the easiest way to do that, no need to add complexity to a login.

Making multiple defaults will never cater for everybody, but everybody can modify the Plasma Desktop to their needs with Activities.

I don’t think so. KDE’s Activities are not powerful enough to enable that, for they share a lot of settings and they share their panels.

Anyway, my point is: Yes, I can easily modify the Plasma Desktop to fit my needs, you can definitely do that, but for someone new to the whole desktop this can be quite a challenge. I’m not saying that plasma should have a default for every single use case, but I think it would benefit new users if they could easily choose from some of the most common desktop paradigms.

This absolutely does make sense.

One addition from me: this would also be a perfect opportunity to implement the long known "inofficial" feature to backup your desktop setting to apply them to a new system. Add an "export settings" and "import settings" button and people are happy.

Hi!

There are no „standards for desktops“ as everyone defines it by his own needs (and trying to defining them results in endless topics going nowhere ). This would be a lot of stuff to prepare and I cannot imagine that it is easier to read through 20 or 30 different cases provided by a wizard than to look at the system settings tool which I think is pretty straight forward and is „your wizard for settings things up„.

For saving configurations there is already a good working plasmoid: PlasmaConfigSaver
Depending on your additional themes and stuff it can require a lot of space, so have a try setting up some different configurations with a dark and light theme or so.

I do personally have a „global config“ for all my Plasma-Desktops saved on a local git server to set up activities and stuff like this. As configurations are nearly always saved in named rc-files one could copy them in place. The problem for new or „less savvy“ users is, that you cannot be graphically logged in while changing these files manually, as they will be overwritten or get messed up. Some things even require a new login to be activated.

What you can do is: Create a new user, set everything up as you want it, then have a look at the changed files since login, e.g. with

Code: Select all

find ~/.config -amin 5

to find all files changed in the last five Minutes.
Then extract the things you need as your default and save them in a seperate folder — or use /etc/skel to have this set up for every new user. As there are a lot of configurations to do, copying is easier, but you could define things manually too.

Two minor Examples:
Activities:

Code: Select all

# ~/.config/kactivitymanagerdrc
[activities]
123456789-1234-1234-1234-0123456789010=Main
123456789-1234-1234-1234-0123456789011=Work
123456789-1234-1234-1234-0123456789012=Media
123456789-1234-1234-1234-0123456789013=Web
123456789-1234-1234-1234-0123456789014=…
[activities-descriptions]
123456789-1234-1234-1234-0123456789010=Default
123456789-1234-1234-1234-0123456789011=Dealing with working hours
123456789-1234-1234-1234-0123456789012=Music was my first love
…
[activities-icons]
123456789-1234-1234-1234-0123456789010=org.kde.krfb
…


Virtual Desktops (available in all activities)

Code: Select all

# ~/.config/kwinrc
[Desktops]
Id_1=09876543-2000-1000-0000-012345678901
Id_2=09876543-2000-1000-0000-012345678902
Name_1=First
Name_2=Second
Number=2
Rows=1


ajinkya wrote:mv ~/.kde4 ~/.kde4.old

In current releases there is no kde4-Folder. It was switched to Plasma5 in 2014…