You just finished ricing your desktop, you tweaked a lot of settings, not just the panel, the icons etc… you configured dolphin to look a certain way, you made okular really minimal by removing toolbars etc… and you wanted to share the entirety of your desktop, not just the look and feel of it, but even the way you configured your apps.
This would not benefit only the community allowing to improve on kde, and maybe create some premade kde desktop that is easier to use for more inexperience people, but could also be used by distros to ship the same thing to a way larger scale.
This would also benefit the reproducibility of KDE, allowing you to not waste hours after buying a new machine to configure it as you had beforehand.
I know tools like konsave exists but this are third-party tools that gonna break after 2/3 KDE updates because it could be that file changes location for example. If this app or settings was made by the KDE team itself, they know before shipping the release if they changed files and can simply update the app / setting.
Also the creation of this app is actually quite straightforward, if the kde team is interested i could also help the creation process of this app, because at the core it just copies all the file from the various locations and then copies/moves the file to the new user machine.
I have a ton of ideas on how to make this app, and how to make it really easy for the user.
some sort of user profile management tool is an often requested feature that is sorely missing from plasma.
it is also an essential piece of the puzzle for how to improve Activities and actually make Activities more useful for switching “heads” when doing distinctly different work with your desktop.
having a nice GUI layer on top of all your settings to help manage your different versions for different activities, and to save and restore any mix of these as a preference settings, i think would be a fantastic addition to plasma.
it should start with a focus on just the settings for the the plasma desktop itself. and then later plugins or updates could add capability for core plasma apps like dolphin, okular, etc and even extend to all installed applications (both native and flatpak/snap) eventually.
I find it really exciting that you pointed this thing about activities, because i’ve actually never used them but yes, i would definitely add this as well. As i said the objective would be to share everything you’ve made inside KDE, whatever part it is. And I also agree about what you said, at the start it should target the desktop itself, the panel, the widgets, the applets etc… and then it could reach to every part of KDE. I’m really glad that you share my ideals, I hope we get noticed and this reaches development one day!
at the core it just copies all the file from the various locations and then copies/moves
I think it should be a bit more complex. For instance you don’t want kwallet config or account information to be copied. Neither should be screen configurations…