Plasma Setup, the new wizard that guides users through the initial configuration of KDE Plasma, is having its first release as part of the Plasma 6.6 release!
How shall this work with something like Fedora’s Cockpit integration, which appears to configure most of this at installation time?
AFAIK Cockpit lets you manage a computer, it doesn’t handle system installation at all.
@Merritt, apologies. Not Cockpit. I’m getting Server and Workstation confused. I refer to Fedora’s new initial configuration interface:
Although, OSTW’s YaST would also be an example.
The idea is that the installer can skip handling the things that plasma setup does, and focus on the job of installing the system. Then the non-technical setup can be done afterwards via plasma setup, including by regular users who don’t know how to install a linux system.
… or keep doing as they have been, and not use plasma setup.
… or only transition some of the functionality to plasma setup, e.g. user creation while keeping the locale/keyboard/etc part of the installation.
Flexibility and customizability was a big consideration when planning this out.
@Merritt, indeed. What I’m asking is whether this exists, in practice, yet. Otherwise, I presume that the user shall see duplicate configuration screens, in new Plasma releases, unless PS detects whether all that it can configure has been?
If not, do you, perhaps, intend to delay such releases for distributions that haven’t yet reduced how much their initial configuration interfaces configure?
There isn’t yet a simple config file or anything to disable plasma setup modules, though the user creation will automatically be skipped if there are already any regular users on the system. This would be a good improvement, though for the time being distros can patch out any module they don’t want since they are all loaded from the modules/ directory.
That is up to the distros to decide; I know for sure both KDE Linux & Fedora 44 Rawhide have already removed from their installers everything that plasma setup handles. If any distro doesn’t have the configuration in place to make those changes to their installer, they definitely don’t have to use plasma setup until they are ready.
Yes. The Fedora work is discussed here on the Fedora Discourse site.
A new integrated initial setup experience will be released alongside the upcoming KDE Plasma 6.6 release. As part of shipping this, the Fedora KDE Anaconda profiles will be tweaked to turn off configuration stages that duplicate the initial setup. This will change the Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition, Fedora KDE Plasma Mobile Spin, and Fedora Kinoite.
I tried it out on KDE Linux a little while ago and I love it. Makes the initial install step a bit simpler and faster. I suppose the only thing it was missing was keyboard layouts? I was installing it on a chrome book and the setup wizard only handled language, but not the specific layout stuff. So I just had to pop into the keyboard settings and tell it I was using an American Chromebook keyboard. Overall its suburb tho. Very polished install experience.
If that was quite some time ago, it might have been before the keyboard module was added.
Otherwise sounds like a bug, because it very much should offer to configure the keyboard. If so you can file a bug report.
Yeah that was a while ago, and a dev version. I’ll take another look at it eventually.
Ok, so I took another look at the setup wizard in the latest release of KDE Linux. I get how it works now. The module was there before. When I searched for Chromebook in the search bar at the top, it only searched the left pane. So it was only searching through the languages. On the right side are all the keyboard layouts for your selected language. I think that’s how it works. So when I searched for Chromebook nothing appeared. I see now that the option is there in the right pane.
I suppose I was expecting something more like how it is in the settings page.
