What KDE would like distributions to do

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Montag, 21. März 2016 10:27:29 CEST Luca Beltrame wrote:
> In data domenica 20 marzo 2016 21:46:43 CET, Thomas Pfeiffer ha scritto:
> 
> Hey Thomas,

Hey Luca,
there are twp things I've been meaning to reply to but haven't found the time 
to do until now:

> > System Settings
> > - Do not ship your own KCMs if they mostly duplicate or replace existing
> 
> While not a "KCM" per se, the openSUSE way to configure the distro is YaST,
> which has an entry in System Settings. Since YaST is used to configure
> things in a distro-neutral way, it's going to stay there. And while it can
> certainly duplicate some functions (the fonts module, for example), we
> think it's a small price to pay.

See, I do not think it is such a small price to pay. To be perfectly honest, 
for me personally (and some others I've talked to), YaST is the single thing 
that has kept me from actually running openSUSE on any of my machines.

To be clear: I don't mean that YaST is a bad piece of software, not at all.
The problem is just that it kind of splits users into "People who have always 
used openSUSE and are so used to it, they don't know how else to configure 
their system" and "People who come from other distributions and cannot get 
used to using YaST to configure their system". This is an oversimplification of 
course, as there are certainly a lot of people who are fine both with or 
without YaST, but it does add a real obstacle to switching to openSUSE.

It is really confusing coming to openSUSE from pretty much any other distro 
when all of a sudden, you have that "parallel universe" to System Settings, 
with some things you can only configure in System Settings, some things you can 
only configure in YaST, some things you can configure in both but the 
configuration options sometimes differ greatly between the two methods.

It does not affect only users coming from other distros, though: Even for 
people who have not used any other Linux distribution before, it is still 
confusing to have two places to configure the same thing, with different 
options.

I know we can't ask you to give up on YaST, but I do not think this is a 
problem we should simply live with without doing anything about it. It 
increases our burden in user support, and it costs you users: at least me and 
everyone I suggest a distribution to (because that means I have to support 
them), but I'm fairly certain that I am not the only one.

Therefore I'd suggest that we try to find ways to improve the situation and 
reduce (and ideally eliminate) user confusion between System Settings and 
YaST.

To be honest, I think even simply removing any of our KCMs whose functionality 
YaST duplicates from openSUSE would already be better than nothing. It would 
force users coming from other distros to change their habits and leanr a new 
GUI, but at least they'd be sure that "Yes, this is the place to configure 
this, and nowhere else."
This would still leave the problem that people would come to us with YaST 
problems, but at least we could just trustingly send them over to their 
distribution's support channels.

> > Discover
> > - Make sure Appstream information is properly pupulated in your
> > distribution. - Make sure PackageKit is properly set up. It's possible to
> 
> We actually provide AppStream information in our packages, and the
> integration is there. However, there are differences between the "regular"
> AppStream specification and what GNOME uses (and we also ship GNOME), so
> things are sometimes more complicated than what it seems at first.

Hm, this sounds like a situation which KDE, GNOME and the AppStream team have 
to solve together. What is a freedesktop.org specification any good for if then 
desktops go ahead and deviate from it?

Best,
Thomas