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As most of you probably know, the primary reason why people prefer GNOME over KDE (or at least why they say they do), is that KDE is too "difficult" to use.

What they usually mean is that KDE adheres to the philosophy that everything should be configurable, and that KDE applications therefore tend to have gigantic option dialogs, menus for every feature imaginable and so on. This intimidates users; they become unable to find what they are looking for amongst all of the options, and think everything looks "bloated" and/or targetted towards more advanced users.

My suggestion is therefore this:
Add a global option in systemsettings that specifies the "difficulty" or "verboseness" of the KDE user interface. It would be a simple selection box that would have options such as "Basic", "Intermediate", "Advanced", "Expert" etc. The actual modes and their names can be agreed upon at a later time, but there should be a fixed set of them. The KDE user interface would then change depending on that setting, by hiding various menu entries or option pages, and so on.

(tl;dr: this is technical, skip this section if you don't care:)
This can be done by introducing a class in the kdelibs that, when inherited from, adds a "difficulty" (or similarily named) property to an arbitrary widget.

The UI designer then makes all the widgets that should have this property inherit from that class, and then specifies the "difficulty level" of that widget. When the setting in systemsettings is changed, a signal will then be sent out to all of those widgets, and if their difficulty setting is higher than the one in systemsettings, the widget is hidden. This makes it very easy to at any time switch between "difficulty levels".

There could alternatively be a subclass of Widget that would have the "difficulty" property, and when the difficulty is changed, that widget and all of its contained widgets would be hidden. This might give the UI designer more flexibility, depending on the situation.

Additionally, it should be possible for an application to override this option in its own settings page, so that you can override the difficulty level for a particular application if you want to.


Opinions?

Great idea!

I think this will solve the problem where developers choose not to add obscure or advanced options to the GUI because it makes them cluttered. We could make the advanced options have an 'expert difficulty' thus keeping normal users and the configuration junkies happy.

This has been up before, and I'm pretty sure that developers/usability people agreed that it's not a good idea. I think someone (Celeste Paul?) wrote about it in a blog post - will see if I can find it again.

There'd be a much easier way to implement it:
In the kcfg architecture.

I've not yet voted, waiting for comments.

^ My technical solution is of course only an option amongst many, so if there's a better one, I say that we embrace it.

It's just that it has to be easy for the GUI designer to use this feature, and ideally, no extra code for intercepting setting changes should be needed; a GUI element is marked with a level of difficulty and that should be it.

If a D-Bus system is required, or something along that route, or anything else for that matter, then that's what should be used.

Don't compromise, optimise!

As a new KDE user, I vote a yes, but on a less serious note, how about a "Select your difficulty!" voice ripped from DDR when you enter the screen?

Seriously, difficulty applies to games, not menus in general. If you gauge menus by their "difficulty," that's actually somewhat concerning. My suggestion would to have different options pertaining to what type of user you are by implementing a set of "profiles" (ex: developer, home user, school, etc). These would determine what menus pop up, and which don't. Profiles could be easily edited and shared, so you could tweak yours, upload it, and share it with other users so that they may select the one that they prefer.

This is the kind of idea that makes me answer the question: Do I really want to drag everyone from Gnome to KDE and why? And the answer is: No, because there is always a compromise between the identity and strength.

I think Gnome has a valid place in there. I have advanced console programming friends using it, because it loads faster and has stable 3D effects (they don't need GUI at all). I've seen people that don't like tinkering using it too.

Why would I want to drag them to environment I use at the cost of;
- making it difficult for developers to design UI,
- risking dumbed down user base in the future,
- making it unpleasant experience for them,
- risking a good name of KDE?

And other than that, I've seen no good example of this design pattern. I'm pretty convinced that an "Advanced..." (or "Advanced>>") button here and there is way simpler solution and much easier to implement.

I use KDE because it is much easier too use, hiding stuff just makes things more difficult for the user not easier. I don't remember the times and hours spent trying to figure out where gnome hid a certain setting to get things to work, whereas in kde it was just a matter of a few seconds

I would consider KDE to be much easier, but I also think it does become overkill at times (do I really want to edit the menu?) If KDE is supposed to be customizable, then why not make it able to customize how custom your experience is?

I think VLC use something like that (at least before the QT version, I'm not sure now)

I think it is quite nice