Has kiosk mode gotten better in plasma 6?

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I’m on debian, which came with plasma 5.27, I remember a few things that really irked me about how the kiosk mode works. This guide truly hasn’t changed from it’s 5.x implementation other than the page being moved around.

Take the file I have called plasma-org.kde.plasma.desktop-appletsrc, it uses the keyword ‘containments’ often, but I don’t recall if that was even documented at all what containment does.

Secondly, the files I’m supposed to put them in are really cryptic where they’re located. I’ve seen /etc/kde5rc, /etc/kded5rc, and the name equiv under /etc/xdg/*rc. So I have to edit, logout/restart, and pray something different happens. Going back to the first point, there was no equivalence of the appletsrc file. Meaning that stuff like user desktop lockdown could not at all be locked, something I would like to see be possible, which hopefully is in plasma 6.

And getting it to actually work was another pain. Half the time, I would not notice any difference making me wonder if its’ a bug, it wasn’t implemented yet, I put it in the wrong file, or I was in the right file but didn’t type it correctly.

I don’t even know if the keys are truly fully documented at all. With my experiences, kiosk mode compared to GNOME feels like an afterthought that was put on the backburner for years. I’m not trying to tear apart plasma as a whole, but it was a gripe on how configuration is a bit of a mess right now.

I’m going to be getting 6.3.5 in about a month or two. What the kiosk mode needs to be better than GNOME is more verbose and clear documentation and anything that can be set similar to dconf be tweaked by the administrator to limit the user should they need to. That’s a common criticism I see about KDE when it comes to specific situations on plasma vs GNOME, that KDE has so many different settings you can’t possibly protect the user from themselves if you’re giving it someone who won’t be able to due to lack of technical knowledge to fix what they broke.

Now, I’m not the only one who sees the kiosk mode needing serious improvements. A matter of months ago, the devs agreed with me the locking down capabilities needs to be overhauled a bit. I do also recall the desktop settings itself was moved into the system on how plasma manages settings, so a step in the right direction.

Anyways, I just wanted to give a bit of my thoughts on the kiosk side of things because I think the KDE developers are doing a great job otherwise, just some things can use improvement.

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Documentation might just not be up to date.

Search paths are $XDG_CONFIG_DIRS (which defaults to /etc/xdg if not set) and $XDG_CONFIG_HOME (which defaults to $HOME/.config if not set).

Any application which uses the KConfig framework should automatically aggregate the setting for the same file name where ever they are found.

I think it is just the same filename, put into any of the other search directories.

Unless Plasma opted-out of the aggregation mechanism for this file.

Some applications do that nicely, they specify their config in a machine readable format (.kcfg files) and often even generate their actual config handling code from that.

I think there were ideas to write a sort of helper application that would read these files and provide a sort of generic config editor with that information.

A quick locate call didn’t find any obviously Plasma related ones though (maybe a file search would come up with more).

I vaguely remember that there was a dedicated mailing list for large scale KDE deployments but I have no idea if that moved to something else.

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Disregard this post, it turns out the docs do mention you have to restart the application for keys to be in effect. In kdeglobals case, the user must log out and log back in.