Couple of notes and issues seen by me and my girlfriend, while setting her up on Fedora (and Linux) for the first time.
I’ve went with the KDE spin, even though I normally use Xfce, for a more polished desktop experience, but still familiar to someone coming from Windows.
Anaconda installer, and installation process
I remember reading about certain changes made to the installer, though those obviously were mostly non visual.
I consider it a big miss, that still on the installation screen the real estate isn’t used in a better way to onboard the new users to the system. The KDE welcome splash screen would work better embedded on this screen, because it took around 15 minutes to do the installation on the old laptop.
I’d like to see the option of bypassing password setting for the user account. Somehow I couldn’t proceed without setting a password, even if an encrypted disk was configured. (To me it feels that empty passwords and an “auto-login” checkbox make sense here.)
First boot notes
The laptop took around 2½ minutes to boot up. (tpm related systemd timeouts which I’ve disabled, and a PITA to fix due to LLM gaslighting)
The fact that it defaults to a 10pt font for the desktop is something… I don’t know if only young users are the intended audience, but that should be generally bumped up to 12pt at the very least!
I know the screen of this laptop sucks, but doesn’t look as washed out as Fedora made it seem on start. (tried different color profiles) Which weren’t a problem, but in the new Plasma I don’t see any gamma correction slider. (I’ve switched the system back to X11, just because I could hack something up with xrandr.) (I’ve read about wlrandr after the fact.)
Happy to see that with Plasma now single-click doesn’t open things by default. Always such an unusual default to get used to.
Day to day KDE usage notes
Whoever made the decision to switch updates to run at boot, made a bad call. Happy to find a way to turn those off, and I hope the option stays there in the future. When a user starts up their computer I’m pretty sure they want to use the computer!
Most of her daily usage can be surmised as internet browsing and photo management across different external media.
Windows partitioned disk in an external usb-connected enclosure is mounted read-only. I don’t know yet if this is something that can be changed through configuration or I’ll have to setup custom udev scripts to have it mounted properly.
What is the protocol over which digital cameras are mounted in Kde? (similar to smartphones MTP protocol?) Whatever it is, it opens up in a way that is hard (if not impossible) to share files directly from this “mount” (a camera: prefix if I recall correctly), but worse is the fact that thumbnails don’t seem to get generated in this mode.
Is there anything in the works in the KDE land to globally get a grip with deletion requests on different disks? I think it’s a very bad experience to have someone try to manage their photos on an SDCard, through Gwenview, and get random error messages about the trash folder when trying to delete a file, and then having to teach them to change their muscle memory to shift+del.
Might be worth raising some of these UX issues upstream in KDE and Fedora?