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I am suggesting that somewhere there be an option to selectively save desktop settings to a file that could later be restored, or even transferred to another machine.

Basically, user would choose "save desktop settings" from a menu (the cashew menu?), and be presented with a dialog containing various choices, like:
[] Plasmoid layout
[] Desktop appearance
[] Color scheme
[] Window manager settings

User could check as many of those components as desired, and the settings would be backed up to a single file.

Similarly, user could selectively load these settings back in to KDE. User would select "load desktop settings" (or "save/load" could bring up a tabbed dialog?), then pick a settings file. Sections that were backed up would be selectable by the user for restore.

This would be nice for users trading settings online; say somebody posts a screenshot, and I like his window decorations and color scheme, but want to try it with my background. He can just send me a settings file, and I can selectively load in those two things. Then, if I decide it worked better with his background, I can just load that section in from the same file.

Since KDE stores these settings in discrete files, seems like this shouldn't be too hard to implement.

This would be quite useful to me. At home, I use a second monitor with my laptop and I have a particular plasmoid set I like to have on the second one. When I travel (and switch to using a single monitor) and then return these settings are lost and I have to build the whole arrangement from scratch again. Simply being able to save and re-load the plasmoid layout from a file would be a vast improvement.

I think this idea could have many other uses. . .

1) you could save your desktop setup before making changes to try out a new arangment. then you could easily go back to you original arangment
2) you could save your desktop setup to take it to a new machine or before re-installing
3) You could save your desktop setup to copy it to a number of users.

I have an idea I will be posting (I still have to write it up) that might make this easier. That is "change Virtual-desktop per monitor" but I don't know how practical it is yet

My following idea is almost duplicate of this idea -

brainstorm.php#idea86270