KDE Plasma: Toward an Environment Accessible to All, Without Sacrificing Power

Brainstorm
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As KDE Linux continues to evolve, the community is preparing to welcome an increasingly diverse range of users to Plasma. In a world where computers have become essential, even for administrative tasks like paying taxes, it’s common to see elderly individuals or those less familiar with technology forced to use them.

However, a significant number of users have different reflexes than those expected by modern interfaces. For example, clicking the center of the touchpad instead of using the left-click. In KDE Plasma, such an action can quickly lead to frustrating or even disastrous situations. Imagine a professor in the middle of a lecture accidentally deleting an entire panel from their interface. They could lose several minutes reorganizing everything in front of a hundred students, disrupting the flow of their teaching.

I don’t want KDE to follow GNOME’s path by removing options in the name of simplicity. Instead, I’d like KDE to develop a simplified mode for Plasma and its settings, which users could enable at startup. This mode would make the environment more accessible to beginners while preserving advanced features for experienced users.

I’m aware that this would require a tremendous amount of work, but I genuinely believe this evolution is crucial for making Plasma a mainstream environment while retaining its flexibility. I’ve already started brainstorming concrete ideas and would love to hear the community’s thoughts on this proposal.

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How does that happen?

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Some users might right-click on the panel without realizing it, and if they don’t react quickly, they might click on “Customize Panel,” which offers many ways to mess things up. It seems unbelievable, but in reality, it’s not that rare.

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I have given presentations, lectures and hosted training sessions both online and in person for hundreds of hours and have never encountered anything like that.

In order to delete a panel you would need to bring up its context menu, go to panel configuration and then select Delete panel.

I couldn’t even do that with the presenter device and would need to go explicitly for the mouse or touch pad and then follow those steps.

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I imagine you mainly watch conferences related to development, but there may be conferences on other topics as well. Accidentally removing a panel seems almost impossible, but believe me, it happens often.

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I was not talking about watching but about being the presenter.

Maybe this was different in an earlier version but right now it requires a multi step process to delete a panel.

Which will trigger a persistent notification to quickly undo that.

You would need to explicitly close that notification window again to end up in a situation in which you would have to manually have to reconstruct a panel.

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The whole motto of plasma is “Simple by default, powerful when needed”
and the devteam really does try to achieve a balance in the name of that slogan.

I’d instead encourage you to find these specific confusion points, and raise an issue on the bugtracker or start a conversation about them here. That way devs can have an actionable route to take in improving plasma.

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If KDE is intended for all types of users, there could very well be a conference on climate change, and in that case, I doubt they would know how to use a complex operating system properly. Therefore, I’m including a link to a video of a Plasma crash that I didn’t intentionally cause and that could happen to anyone: https://devsk.org/screenshots/bug.mp4
My initial aim was to show you that a relatively inexperienced user can, without realizing it, swap the positions of widgets.

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I’m not talking about bugs, I’m saying that an option at startup to activate a “simple” mode to simplify Plasma would attract more people.

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Plasma makes it very easy to use a complex operating system by presenting nice an intuitive UI for most of the OS’s operations.

Well, a crash is a bug, whether it has been provoked or randomly happened.

This had nothing to do with the claim that someone might accidentally remove a panel by accidentally going through a multi step process that requires several accidental clicks with two mouse different buttons and accidental mouse movement to a delete button and then accidentally closing the undo notification by even more accidental mouse movement and accidentally clicking the notifications close icon instead of willingly clicking the undo button.

It just sounds like a very unlikely scenario to happen.

There can be a lot of different interpretations on what is considered “simple”, especially what the difference would be to the already simple default.

What would your “simple” entail?

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while i don’t think the scenario you present here is at all likely or common with suddenly finding yourself in edit mode and unable to escape in the middle of lecture, i do agree that a kiosk mode (or presenter mode) is appropriate from some situations where you need to eliminate the possibility of evoking any kind of settings or configuration GUI while locked down in this mode.

there already exists a kiosk mode feature set, the perhaps could be buffed and made into a toggle so that you could pass your laptop for desktop to someone and not worry about them mucking up your settings.

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Ideally, there would be a startup option that allows users to set a number of Kiosk restrictions and configure them within an application, similar to the approach used by Kiosk Admin Tool - KDE Applications .

Plasma makes it very easy to use a complex operating system by presenting nice an intuitive UI for most of the OS’s operations.

I ​​don’t think Plasma’s settings are very intuitive.

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One really low hanging fruit would be an option to disable 2- and 3-finger taps. You can control what they do to some extent, but not disable them. I have a couple of mostly numb fingers on my right hand and I sometimes get accidental actions without even noticing it until later. This is particuarly bad when something gets stealthily pasted into some source code!

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I also frequently open the Panel Configuration by mistake. The reason is that in order to close a window from the taskbar, you have to right-click the icon and then left-click the first option from the bottom (Close), but if you instead misclick the taskbar and instinctively click the first option from the bottom, it will open up the Panel Configuration. To make matters worse, returning from Panel Configuration is not intuitive: The top-right of the screen shows a blurred background with no exit option, and the actual button that you have to press (Exit Edit Mode) has a check mark next to it instead of an X which is commonly associated with closing a program.

A partial solution could be to swap around the items in the menu that opens when you right-click the taskbar so the one at the bottom is less intrusive (e.g. Configure Icons-and-Text Task Manager…)

EDIT: After a few more misclicks leading me to Panel Configuration, it seems to be happening mostly when I’m trying to close a window in the taskbar by right-clicking it and then accidentally clicking ‘Show Panel Configuration’, which is right above ‘Close’.

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Hello all you great and interesting and smart people! This is my first post! :grin: Debian testing 13 with Plasma 6.3.6 here. Therefore, some of what I experience might already have been fixed or changed in later Plasma versions.

As a relative newcomer to Plasma, and I will say in advance that I absolutely love Plasma and now only use Windows in situations where I have to, I can agree that the first many times you dabble with panel configurations, it is with quavering heart, and you don’t know intuitively what will happen if you click here or there, even though you can figure some out, of course. You fear that things will go away, and yes I’ve made panels vanish and been a bit at a loss on how to get them back in the right places in the beginning.

I also agree that it might be helpful to newcomers with less experience and computer knowledge, that things are locked in place until you choose, by some easily accessible toggle, to unlock panel configurations.

People with less computer experience will come in larger numbers as Linux gains popularity and Microsoft keeps annoying more and more people, and therefore I am also a supporter of the idea that until you know what to do, you won’t be able to do it by accident.

Although I am certainly not a Windows fan, you could say that it is next to impossible to make the taskbar go away. The problem with Windows is that even if you SHOULD want it to, or just to change it, you can’t easily do it, and here, the power of Plasma shows.

I think the best of both worlds would be if you could choose “idiot proof” (Probably a less offensive button name though :joy:) when you set up Plasma, and then you can unlock advanced features with an easy flip of a switch later if you want, but when you do, a warning might be right at the side of the toggle: “Hey, read up on this right here, before you unlock it. It might get a little tricky, so spend 10 minutes here to get the basics”

I know that everyone should read the manual first but people have gotten used to not really having to, because standard settings in Windows and MacOS are mostly intuitive and hard to mess up. This is part of the reason why so many don’t switch to Linux. They’re used to the OS distributors thinking for them and the thought of learning Linux feels overwhelming to them.

If we want more people inside the ecosystem, it might be good to think a little more for them than we feel we ought to, while at the same time letting them know that we have their back if they want to tinker.

I know that my dad would love to see two buttons during setup that said as much as

“Just make stuff work and make sure I don’t get any chance to mess anything up”

“I’m a meddler and a tinkerer. Bring it on!

I know which one my dad would click if he saw it during the installation process.

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Isn’t that simply fixable via undo notification and keeping that notification in notification tray? Anything that can be messed up seriously has easy undo fix, most applets removal has this already.

Will only need to make it known that any serious disrupt can be undone here in this section.

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That is, in my opinion, a very good idea! Make the notification hard to miss and easy to access so whatever is done can be undone.

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