SUMMARY Plasma Welcome does a great job of introducing people to Plasma, but it also offers prompts and settings that are inappropriate when booted into a live environment. However, Plasma Welcome can be useful for live environments, and it'd be great for it to be configured with the ability to present a welcome to tour Plasma or to launch the OS installer. STEPS TO REPRODUCE 1. Boot an F38 nightly compose ISO, like this one: https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/compose/branched/Fedora-38-20230222.n.0/compose/Spins/x86_64/iso/Fedora-KDE-Live-x86_64-38-20230222.n.0.iso OBSERVED RESULT Plasma Welcome starts up and guides you through configuring Plasma in the live environment as if it's a permanent installed one. EXPECTED RESULT When Plasma Welcome detects it's operating in a live environment (if "rd.live.image" is in the kernel command-line, it's a live environment), it starts in a different mode suitable for live environments, where it offers either to give you a tour of Plasma or launch the distribution installer. SOFTWARE/OS VERSIONS Linux/KDE Plasma: Fedora Linux 38 (KDE Plasma) (available in About System) KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.0 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.103 Qt Version: 5.15.8 ADDITIONAL INFORMATION This was discovered by Kamil Paral of Fedora QA: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/kde@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/YY7AKUD2737IOCE47QEQDIBLEQUXUJ5V/
We can adjust the pages that appear on a live environment. I'm wondering how it would be best to detect, in the autostart helper, that the application is inside of a live environment. Perhaps username?
well, there may not be a good cross-distro way to do it :/ AFAIK, live boot is implemented differently on different distros, so there isn't just one reliable indicator. Fedora's live environment user is called 'liveuser', but I doubt it's the same on other distros. for GNOME, we do this customization [downstream](https://pagure.io/livesys-scripts/blob/main/f/libexec/livesys/sessions.d/livesys-gnome) - specifically, lines 58-61 disable the upstream GNOME welcome tour, and lines 51-56 enable the custom welcome screen we show on live boots instead. It may be the case that we need to do something similar for Plasma - upstream just needs to allow some sort of mechanism here (give the welcome tour a "live mode" or whatever), and we do the actual customization to make it kick in downstream.
(In reply to Adam Williamson from comment #2) > It may be the case that we need to do something similar for Plasma - > upstream just needs to allow some sort of mechanism here (give the welcome > tour a "live mode" or whatever), and we do the actual customization to make > it kick in downstream. It's possible for the live user that you could disable the autostart KDED service (added in 6.0 or git master), and launch the welcome app with a custom argument. We could also add a different welcome page for live environments. To show the installer, a distro page could be added in the live environment. Some thought to more customising the order of these pages could help.
If compiling the app differently in the live environment is okay, we could add a CMake flag you can compile it with that will cause the autostart helper to launch the app in live user mode, rather than welcome mode.
No, that can't work. It has to be something that can be poked by a script during startup, basically - some kind of config file entry, magic file, something like that.
(In reply to Adam Williamson from comment #5) > No, that can't work. It has to be something that can be poked by a script > during startup, basically - some kind of config file entry, magic file, > something like that. Config would work! It could be a simple key in plasma-welcomerc, like LiveUser=true that causes the autostart helper to use a different mode.
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-welcome/-/merge_requests/65
Yeah, sounds like we'll need to do that. Now onto the question of what it should display in live user mode. I guess we should have a custom page with a brief welcome to the distro as well as plasma, with a button to launch the installer, alongside a button to see the normal pages for a tour of Plasma. The app that the button launches would be controlled by a desktop file, which could also be specified in the config file (or that could be a CMake option, and then it would be unused outside of the live environment mode).
A possibly relevant merge request was started @ https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-welcome/-/merge_requests/81
Git commit 7838d980b688c7f8f457563f801a1de4ad823026 by Oliver Beard. Committed on 21/06/2023 at 20:54. Pushed by olib into branch 'master'. Add a live environment mode for distro installers This adds a new mode, which shows a different first page for the distro and prevents showing settings pages. M +14 -1 README.md M +8 -0 src/config.kcfg M +13 -6 src/contents/ui/main.qml A +61 -0 src/contents/ui/pages/Live.qml [License: GPL(3+eV) GPL(v3.0) GPL(v2.0)] M +16 -0 src/controller.cpp M +4 -1 src/controller.h M +13 -7 src/kded/daemon.cpp M +3 -0 src/main.cpp M +1 -0 src/resources.qrc https://invent.kde.org/plasma/plasma-welcome/-/commit/7838d980b688c7f8f457563f801a1de4ad823026