RFC: System Settings categorisation overhaul

[Darío Andrés]

Well... we are going to discuss this a little further.... I think the
boundary "Look"  -   "Behavior"  is not really properly defined.

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Martin said:
So perhaps spliting the category "Workspace and Application behaviour" into
"Workspace behaviour" and "Application behaviour". Then we could move screen
edges, desktop effects, etc. into this group directly as toplevels.
--

Another difficult task for us was to not have too much "top level
categories" as it will not allow to see all the settings in SS without
scrolling the first time.

Also, we are looking forward a "widescreen" layout (not too much top
level categories, with a lot of subitems in each one), that way some
"SS too tall" problems could be fixed, and it is also the way we are
moving (netbook). Besides that I think it looks better that way
(otherwise it would feel "too empty" and "unbalanced")

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I agree on changing some of the names to something less technical and
more discoverable/user-friendly:

"Plasma Containments" surely needs a new name (besides that it also
includes other settings not directly related to containments).
It could be named "Plasma" or "Plasma Desktop". May be some day more
Plasma settings can be added in a "Plasma" category...

"Semantic Search" -> "Desktop Search" . I think that is OK

"PIM Resources".... "Personal Accounts" is a bit mix of concepts IMHO,
because you already have some other information from your personal
account in that computer(user login, password, other data). We need a
"friendly name" for "PIM" to use.

Moving "AudioCd" and "CDDB" to "Multimedia" would make sense (never
though of that)

"International" -> "Locale" it makes sense but another subitem is
named "Locale" too... one of those two should be renamed.

"K3BSetup" could be moved to the new category "Others"/Legacy, or just
System Administration..

"User Session" is named that way because it contains "session
settings" (session management(ksmserver), kde services, autostart apps
and scripts...)... How would you name it and where would you put them
?

"Optical Drives" to merge into -> "Removable Devices" . Using the
concept to describe those, "a CD media" is not a "device" but a
"media"/"storage" ... the same way a "CD/DVD read-write drive" is not
"Removable". So if we are going to merge those two we need to came
with a better name for the whole item... "Removable Storage" would fit
it....  (too bad "Camera" is also there..., may be we could extract
it...)
Besides that, we already moved out all the modules inside "Optical
Drives" (see above), so this may not be necessary at all.

Marco said:
-about me is maybe even more descriptive than account management

Currently "Account Management" includes also "Password Management
(kwallet)"... I think "About me" doesn't include password management.
If we are going to use that name we need to extract "Password
Management" out.

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Renaming the category "Personal" to "Personal and Appearance" makes
sense. (I like it too)

--

The "settings" word should not be used in any item or subitem.. being
at SystemSettings already means all the things over there are
settings...

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And now the big deal: "Workspace"

I agree about that concept including Plasma+KWin, those components
describe the KDE Workspace properly. I used that definition to split
up "Applications Look" and "Desktop Look" (according to that logic,
the "Applications Look" are used on every KDE app even if you are
running another "Desktop/Workspace" (ex. KDE4 apps in GNOME); while
"Desktop Look" is only applied if you are running a full KDE session,
including its desktop (Plasma) and its WM(KWin))).

I also see the great efforts from both Plasma and KWin side into
bringing some integration.

As Ben said, the word "Workspace" is a bit "generic"; however I don't
really know which one to use.
May be some complete name like "KDE Desktop and Workspace" would make
sense, however that would include both "look" and "behavior" (and we
are again in that problem).

Besides that, this "Workspace" item will have too much subitems in its
"sidebar"; and we are trying to avoid that to reduce scrolling. Too
bad some settings belong to both worlds... and can't be "splitted"
properly.

Having a "Personal, Appearance and Behavior" category with all the
items on it will be too much I think..............

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This task will be hard, we need to check all the .desktop files and
modify them. We also need to split some modules in two (extracting
code); even from "ancient KCMs"(unmaintained since years).. that will
not be easy; but it deserves that work from my PoV.

------

Thank you very much for all the people proposing ideas and discussing this.
Sorry about this massive post, but the original thread had too much
feedback in no time and it would be a problem to reply everyone in a
separate mail; besides that, a lot of ideas were shared by different
people.

Have a nice weekend.
Regards.

Darío
KDE Bugsquad, DrKonqi2