KDE’s New Initial Setup Tool Aims to Improve User Onboarding

A smooth and intuitive user onboarding experience is crucial for any modern operating system, as it’s the very first impression users get after booting up for the first time. This can make or break their overall perception of it.

Mainstream OSes like Windows and macOS both have nice initial setups that take users through essential steps like language selection, timezone settings, account creation, and privacy settings.

While I'm not a fan of the telemetry prompts and pre-installed bloat these systems often push users to accept and install, the concept of a guided first-run experience itself is neat.

On the Linux side, GNOME provides a comparable first-run experience, but not every distro comes with it out of the box. That’s where KDE’s new initial setup tool for Plasma comes in.

KDE Plasma’s User Onboarding is About to Get Better

Okay, so the tool itself isn't entirely new; it has been around in KDE's repository for over four years now. It's called KDE Initial System Setup, or "KISS" for short. Two months ago, KDE developer Kristen McWilliam set out to revive it by giving it much-needed TLC.

The project initially started out as a way to provide KDE Plasma with a basic first-run setup experience, something that could guide users through essential steps like creating a user account, setting the system language, and keyboard layout.

In her blog, Kristen shared the current state of the undertaking, noting that the tool now successfully builds and runs, with new features like user account creation, language and keyboard layout selection, basic CI, and the addition of ECM logging.

For the future, there are plans for the tool to auto-run on first boot and in live sessions, allow authentication without a user prompt, have better, more developer-friendly documentation, and get a new name.

I like where this is headed. If it’s ready before the upcoming Windows 10 EOL in October, it could be a real game changer for KDE Plasma and help retain new users. I hope other major desktop environments like Cinnamon, Xfce, and Budgie take note of this and consider overhauling their user onboarding experience as well.

Via: OMG! Ubuntu