What KDE would like distributions to do

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

Hi everyone,
we have now collected what we think distributions can do to make our software shine, and here is what we were able to come up with:

General
-  No downstream patching, if possible
	- If it's strictly necessary, we'd very much appreciate it if it was together with a bug report on https://bugs.kde.org
	- If you can develop a fix for a problem yourself, that's great, but please offer it upstream instead of just patching your own packages
- Applications: Try to make sure that the default applications you install integrate properly with Plasma
- Respect release cycles. If you are able to synchronize your release schedule with ours, that would be ideal
- Most optional dependencies are because of non-linux platforms
	- We expect Linux distributions to fulfill them
- Recompile plasma-integration/frameworks-integration on every Qt update (and any other software using private Qt API)

Testing
- Please Test stuff systematically, not just a quick unstructured "Let's use the new release ourselves for a while and see if it breaks" kind of test
- Have a set of testing criteria per component, share them, maybe even automate them. Different distros cater to a different set of users, each of whose requirements are different. It would be nice if distros actually tested that specific configuration.
- It's super important to have this "testing" process reproducible.

Look and Feel
- Our Visual Design Group dedicates lots of effort to provide quality visuals. Please use them if possible.
	- If you want to create your own themes, we'd encourage you to discuss your changes with the VDG to ensure the quality is as expected.
- Make sure the experience is coherent from boot to shutdown (GRUB theme, Plymouth, login manager, lock screen, ...)
- If visual changes are provided, store them into a Look and Feel package so the user is able to easily switch from the distro default one to the upstream default one (Breeze) and vice versa

Plasma & KWin:
- Graphics drivers are very important for a comfortable Plasma experience. Make sure they're correctly set up.

System Settings
- Do not ship your own KCMs if they mostly duplicate or replace existing KCMs. This causes confusion for users and makes our user support more difficult (users might not know that a KCM comes from the distribution, ask us for support and we think it's our KCM). If you think certain KCMs should be improved, please work with us upstream so we can improve the experience for everyone

KWallet
- Configure your display manager to be able to unlock the default wallet via PAM (see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/KDE_Wallet#Unlock_KDE_Wallet_automatically_on_login ), so that we can instruct users to simply use their account password as Wallet password if they don't want to unlock it manually

Discover
- Make sure Appstream information is properly pupulated in your distribution.
- Make sure PackageKit is properly set up. It's possible to have a different backend, besides PackageKit, but it's not the recommended solution, for maintainability.

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Comments? Questions?
Thanks,
Thomas