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Pick new apps for default set of favorites

The Task Manager and Kicker/Kickoff/etc have different sets of pinned/favorite apps, rather than sharing the same data. This makes the launcher menus useful to store "second level" favorites that you use frequently, but not as frequently as the apps you have pinned to your Task Manager. It also means that having the same set of apps in both is redundant and unnecessary -- a relic of the times before we shipped pinned Task Manager apps by default.

Another interesting quirk here is that favorite apps are presented differently by the different menu representations. In Kicker, only the app icon is visible. In Kickoff and Dashboard, the app icon and name are visible, but the description is not. That means that all the default favorite apps that new users will see should be comprehensible by their icon and name alone, and preferably the icon itself should be enough.


Accordingly, this commit updates the default sets of apps in Kicker and Kickoff to achieve the tollowing:

  • Eliminate redundancy; every app that's pinned to the Task manager by default is removed from the default set of favorites here.
  • Remove apps that are not distinguishable by their name and icon alone, such as Kate. Kate is replaced with KWrite, which has a more descriptive icon and name, and is likely to be a batter default text editor for the average user anyway.
  • Add a few more useful and likely-to-be-installed apps that have descriptive names and/or recognizable icons, such as the LibreOffice apps, GIMP, and KCalc.

See the diff for the full actual list of favorite apps being proposed here. The system is smart enough to omit apps that are not installed, so that's not a problem.


I didn't add Krita, Elisa, Gwenview, Okular, or Spectacle for the same reason I removed Kate: because they have brand names and a somewhat unclear or abstract icons. These apps really need for the description to be shown to be comprehensible for new users--who are the target for the default set of favorite apps, after all.

I didn't add Konsole because it seemed too nerdy to be appropriate for new users.

I didn't add kolourpaint because this new list already has a lot of apps in it, but that's another option. Skanlite is another one, though it's becoming more and more rare for people to have flatbed scanners nowadays, so I thought the likelihood of being used might be too low to merit being a default favorite app.

@teams/usability @teams/vdg

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