System misconfiguration detection hub
In an ideal world, the user wouldn't have a misconfigured system. Distros would all follow https://community.kde.org/Distributions/Packaging_Recommendations and pre-install a complete set of support packages. Samba sharing would be set up correctly out of the box. No one would manually mount network shares using /etc/fstab
and cause system hangs. Etc.
Unfortunately we don't live in that world and we probably never will. Even in our own Neon distro, we can pre-configure stuff correctly to avoid one source of configuration problems, but we can't actively inhibit user errors made outside of KDE software. We can say, "meh, not my problem" but it kind of is since KDE gets blamed for the issues caused by these preventable errors.
We could have a system to detect known sources of misconfiguration, alert the user about them, and offer known remedies. For example:
- Detect that
qt5ct
is installed -> explain that this will break theming and file dialogs, show a button to remove it, and explain that supported configuration changes can be made in System Settings. - Detect that
xdg-desktop-portal-gnome
is installed -> explain that this is unnecessary and will break various apps, and show a button to remove it. - Detect that a network share has been manually added to
/etc/fstab
or manually mounted -> Explain that this will cause system hangs, show a button to set up an auto-mount for it using kio-fuse with an entry in the Places panel pointing to it for quick access. - Detect when important KDE packages are missing; things like
kio-fuse
,kio-extras
,kdeplasma-addons
,dolphin-plugins
(when Dolphin is installed),baloo-widgets
(when Baloo is on), and so on -> show a button to install them, along with a "don't warn about this again" checkbox.