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Hi,

I already wrote a post on a may be general new approach on system settings, but I also came up with other issues. My original approach was also a suggestion for a better grouping, which was not totally satisfying, but I still think some of the suggestions I came up may be useful anyway).

General: The advanced tab does not make much sense to me. At the moment there are not so much settings and it is not always clear why a setting is "advanced"

My suggestions

Startup and Shutdown (new section)
Autostart (new name: KDE Autostart)
GRUB-Editor (Using a more explaining name)
Login-Manager
Session Management

Look and Feel
Appearance (rename it to: General Appearance)
Desktop (rename it to: Desktop Appearance)
Notifications
Window Behaviour
Panel (new, I think panel configuration should also be here or as part of Desktop Appearance)
Desktop Theme Details

Hardware
Printer Configuration (new: Printer)
Display
Mouse (here I miss Thinkpad Trackpoint configs)
Multimedia (better: Sound+Video, because a Digital Camera is also Multimedia); it should be also offer to install further phonon backends via the software management
Digital Camera
Power-Management
Webcam (new, at the moment I think it is configured in Kopete)
Hardware (is very confusing, because other things are also Hardware (may be: Hardware Backends, “plug/Play”/ Hardware detection)
Hardrives (for partition manager)

Network & Connectivity; and something describing "Up/downloads"
Network-Settings
KGET/KTorrent-Settings (Downloads/Uploads)
UPNP-Stuff
-> It would be also useful if it allowed to install additional network functionality like not installed VPN-drivers.
--> Configure Service Discovery is totally unexplained I do not know what its for.
--> I can not see why sharing is a separate point and not part of network setting. Sharing is irritating. If it has something to do with Windows the name should refer to it, may "Windows Network"?

Security, Privacy and Convenience
Kwallet (better: Password-Manager)
Firewall (new, i miss this)
Anonymity (Tor-Configuration)
Encryption (GNUPG-Stuff)
Security-Updates (new: Software Updates only concerning security)
Spamfilters (configuring Spamfilter-backends; at the moment part of Kmail, but there are more mailclients (lion-mail, mailody) coming, so a central setting no matter what client you use would be good
Phishing-Filters (see spam-filter)
Virus-Scanner (just for telling users that they don't need it, I know of many users who were looking for it)
Kioskmode (new, but I heard that this is coming again)
Policy-Kit

Applications, Webservices
Install and Remove Software
Windows Software Management=Wine (new)
Default Applications
Default Webservices (new, I believe this will be necessary with time)
->CDDB (better: something telling what it does, may be "CD-title fetcher"?
->Maps (new: your favourite mapping service, so that apps like Kaddressbook can use it)
->RSS (you online storage for RSS-feeds)
->Online-Backups (your storage for online-backups, may be differentiated by file types)
→ Keyservers (for fetching GNUGPG-key)
Application Settings (new: access to all settings of applications and applets)
Fileassociations
Add-ons and Additional Data (may be there should be also a central overview over add-ons and additional data which has been installed via the KNEWstuff-framework and the possibility to remove it.

Personal
About me
Email-Accounts
Messenger-Accounts
Passwords (linking to your personal Wallet on Kwallet)
Bookmarks
--> It could also contain a backup-functionality for this data

About the rest:
I did not finish this, because I could not find good sections where I could put them together. At the moment I would call them "Other". I still hope the above suggestions give some inspirations for the start.

Another on:
Audio CD “IO-Slave” Configuration, no normal user would know what an io-slave is, suggestion: remove the word "IO-slave"; it would be useful if the user would be able to install the missing mp3-codec here or would be (for legal reasons just informed).

Mark

So instead of having the existing tabs, have proper categories? Windows already has something like this in XP and Vista/7, and I find it annoying, but certainly good for new users. +1

Angel Blue01 wrote:So instead of having the existing tabs, have proper categories? Windows already has something like this in XP and Vista/7, and I find it annoying, but certainly good for new users. +1

I don't know about Windows. What KDE has at the moment is definitely confusing. Only the two tabs and several categories which are inconsistent and there are things missing. My suggestion should cover a first step. I would rather prefer what I came up with in my second suggestion.

Mark

System settings has been reorganized for 4.5