Plasma welcome wizard plans

[Nate Graham]

So it seems pretty clear that distro extensibility is a desired feature. 
We'll be discussing this during Akademy next week at 11 AM on Wednesday 
in room 1; see https://community.kde.org/Akademy/2022/Wednesday. If 
you're attending, please feel free to participate!

Hopefully I can recruit someone far more talented at software 
development than I to get it done, but if not, I'll gird my loins and 
try to code it up myself.

Nate


On 9/21/22 13:47, Erich Eickmeyer wrote:
> Hi Nate,
> 
> Doing this one with my Ubuntu Studio hat on.
> 
> On Monday, September 19, 2022 5:23:33 PM PDT Nate Graham wrote:
>> Hello distro folks!
>>
>> A few of us have been working on a welcome wizard for Plasma; see
>> https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-welcome. The idea is to be an
>> onboarding experience to teach people basics about what KDE and Plasma
>> weare, how to get started using the system, how to get involved and
>> donate, and so on. It would also be used to show release notes after
>> upgrade.
>>
>> I know some of you represent distros that already have their own
>> first-run wizards. We don't want the user to see two wizards, so would
>> you prefer to continue showing your own wizard and don't show the KDE
>> one (which is perfectly fine), or to migrate the content in yours to one
>> or more new pages the KDE one, should such a thing become possible by
>> supplying custom distro-specific pages?
>>
>>
>> Nate
> 
> For a while now, and it's no secret since OMG! Ubuntu published an article
> about it about four years ago, but we (Ubuntu Studio) had been working on a
> welcome app four years ago that never really got off the ground. Back then we
> were on Xfce and two years ago we switched to Plasma as our DE.
> 
> Having a fully-customizable welcome app would be very... "welcome", but it
> would have to be modular. I like what the calamares installer has done where
> the base package looks for files in specific locations for its modules and
> customizations, but those files are installed by a separate package.
> 
> Right now, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it appears as though everything in
> this app is hard-coded into the binary itself. That's problematic as it leaves
> very little for customization from a distribution standpoint. What I'd like to
> see is something where these pages that are hardcoded can be enabled/disabled
> via some sort of configuration file. For instance, if a /usr/share/plasma-
> welcome directory with the necessary distribution assets and plasma-
> welcome.json file would exist with the proper configuration were to exist to
> specify the configuration, that would be fairly acceptable.
> 
> In summary, I think this would be excellent if it were modular and
> customizable for the distribution. Ubuntu Studio would use this to introduce
> various features and aspects of the included applications, whereas I'm sure
> Kubuntu, which is more Plasma-centric, would probably make few customizations.
> 
> That said, I look forward to seeing where this project goes, and I'll be
> watching it closely.
> 
> Erich