Can not configure Plasma bottom panel nor Dolphin with Kiosk

Hi,

I am trying to configure some default settings to be able to deploy KDE. I am doing my tests with Debian “hopefully-soon-stable” 12 (Plasma 5.27.2). I follow the kiosk mode documentation, and it works properly for some settings (night color, baloo search, power management, Discover).

However, I have very strange results when trying to configure the bottom panel:

  • From a new user with default settings, I customize the panel (changing some applications shortcuts, disabling clipboard)
  • Using fswatch, I could determine that the relevant configuration file is ~/.config/plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc
  • If I copy this file to /etc/xdg/, my settings are not applied to new users (while it works for other files like kscreenlockerrc)
  • As a workaround, if I copy this file to /etc/skel/.config/, settings are applied to new users BUT the panel gets a height of 30 instead of 44 (the default).

Also, a somewhat similar issue is for configuring Dolphin (toolbar, left panel, right panel, detailed view by default):

  • I found that the relevant files is ~/.local/share/kxmlgui5/dolphin/dolphinui.rc (strangely /etc/dolphinrc does not seem to contain the settings I am interested in)
  • If I copy this file to /etc/xdg/dolphinui.rc, my settings are not applied for new users
  • After copying this file to /etc/skel/.local/share/kxmlgui5/dolphin/dolphinui.rc, settings are indeed applied to new users except “overview in right panel” and “detailed view by default”

What am I doing wrong? I suppose I missed something from the documentation, but could not find what. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Regards,
Yvan

For reference, I reported the issue for the panel, see https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=469061.