Hi everyone
The default KDE/Plasma 5 installation in Stretch, via task-kde-desktop, in my
opinion doesn't provide the best user experience because of the many
applications installed by default.
While the experience with the Plasma desktop is pretty good, the same
cannot be said for some KDE applications. To improve the situation, at
least for me, in different occasions I had to:
- manually install only the required KDE applications in a minimal Debian
setup;
- or manually remove all the unwanted KDE applications in the default KDE
installation (and break meta-packages).
The main issue is that, in some cases, the applications required recursively
by the package task-kde-desktop are obsolete, bugged and/or are useless
redundancies. I'll make some examples at the end of this e-mail to better
explain my point of view.
I don't know if there are other users considering this as a usability issue
but, in case, and if it is still possible to do something given the freeze of
Stretch, it could be solved by changing the applications listed as
dependencies and recommended by the meta-packages used in the default KDE
installation in Stretch.
I'm working just for myself on a list of packages that can be omitted or
substituted and if someone is interested I can continue in this discussion.
Regards
Francesco
EXAMPLES
========
Let's start with Konqueror, installed by default in the case discussed above.
Despite its history and how interesting it is, we all know that Konqueror
nowadays lacks developer manpower. Its web engines are obsolete and probably
not suitable anymore for a safe web surfing. Surely many of us will not suggest
its usage, especially to newcomers. Firefox and Chromium are far superior web
browsers and, besides, Firefox is recommended by task-kde-desktop and it is
installed in the default KDE installation.
Konqueror can also be used as a file manager but we already have Dolphin, that
I'm sure is considered the de facto file manager in the Plasma desktop,
installed along with it. Konqueror therefore is pretty much useless and
redundant in a standard installation. If it so, why install it by default?
Same story with some of the KDEPIM applications installed by
task-kde-desktop/kde-standard. I'm a Kmail user but like many others I know
that Kmail can be a difficult beast to handle, it has its bugs, akonadi could be
a pain sometimes, and it lacks developer manpower too (and maybe it will be
replaced by Kube in the future).
Despite I'm using Kmail I will probably suggest to other users and newcomers
to try Icedove/Thunderbird instead, or simply use their e-mail accounts via
web browser if it is too much for them. In my opinion Kmail and friends should
not be installed by default.
There are other cases like that or minor redundancies, such as Kate and Kwrite
installed altogether. Why install them both?