I recently installed Arch, the old way and realised a few things.
For Plasma, I just did pacman -S plasma and realised that certain parts didn’t work ootb.
Applets that are setup in the default panel, have unmet dependencies. Specially the ones in the system tray. The dependencies are of 2 types:
some packages need installing
some services need being started
It would be good to have a tab that lists all unmet dependencies and shows all available options that will work to make those applets work:
e.g. For the firewall applet, you have the option for ufw/firewalld, but if the user hasn’t chosen already, also the option for iptables/iptables-nft.
Then it should also state that the corresponding systemd service needs to be enabled and started.
Would be nice to just click that entry and have it use pkexec to run the corresponding command for the service thing.
No idea about systems without systemd
This might require coordinating with whichever distro we are packaging for.
This seems like something highly distro-specific, so it would be quite complicated at the KDE level, I’d guess.
Otherwise, if it weren’t Arch and its very DIY nature, this would be a distro issue, as they would normally have the required dependencies by default as part of their Plasma setup to begin with.
Some packages in Arch feel weird too for this.
Even considering the “DIY” nature, it makes sense to list an optional dependency as an optional dependency.
I have seen some packages just not have that, when pacman clearly has the functionality for it.
Granted though, that didn’t happen with Debian (or maybe it did and I just don’t remember well) and most other Distros are too featureful from the start to expect any missing dependency.
But on the KDE side, perhaps we just need to make the applets’ requirements (just for the default added ones would be good enough) a bit louder and then give an easy way to the maintainer to add a list of simple buttons with labels that they can define in some pre-compile configuration. There seems to have been some interest from the distro side for this too so might as well give this to them as a suggestion and an option.
Welcome Center is designed to introduce the user to Plasma, not a way to communicate how to correct packaging or installation issues.
It’s not 100% clear what the issues you saw were, but they need to be debugged directly to determine what the problem was. Once the exact problem is identified, solutions can be investigated.
Also I’m not sure what firewall applet you’re referring to, as I’m not aware that Plasma comes with one. This might be a 3rd-party thing, which would make it extra-especially inappropriate for Welcome Center to tell you how to fix it!
tl;dr This was an immature thought. I should come back when I have a better concept.
Just checked it out. Looks like I mistook the thing provided with firewalld as a plasma applet because somewhere I saw “enable firewalld or ufw”.
Well, it doesn’t really have to be the Welcome Center. I just think it would be good to have some kind of early notification for any applet’s requirement, instead of realising when the user tries to use the corresponding feature.
I understand that for cases where something needs to be installed, it is better to give it as an optional dependency in pacman and then the user can use their hooks to check if they require the thingy. And I jumped the gun at asking for reports for package installation.
For the few odd cases where I did find a missing optional package, I have informed… err someone. I’ll get back when I recall or find it again. But of course, that’s for the package maintainer.