Consider reversion of plasma-meta -> plasma-desktop

[Tiagoquix]

#4076 introduced a change where plasma-desktop is the package installed instead of plasma-meta for the Plasma profile.

However, the plasma-desktop package doesn't include some possible important things such as the Plasma Welcome Center, some System Settings KCM modules (firewall, Wi-Fi) and so on.

I know that removing Discover/Flatpak would be desirable, but plasma-desktop seems to be too minimal, at least from my testing. So I suggest reverting the change for a more complete out-of-the-box installation.

Thanks.

CC @h8d13 @svartkanin

[h8d13]

I believe there was another mention of this in issues and originally I wanted 2 profiles.

(Mostly for faster testing, and also that it pulls sddm-kcm and discover/fp)

'plasma-pa', 'kscreen' (sound/display settings) are missing that I've noticed. And I mentionned that in the other issue. But didn't notice anything with wifi myself

I think its better to incrementally add missing "essential" pieces instead of pulling all of it, but otherwise a revert is fine too

Cheers, Hade

[Tiagoquix]

Hi Hade

I agree, plasma-desktop with select packages would be good, but for now I believe plasma-meta is the less explosive option. Thanks.

[imshinyu]

wish it was possible to modify the profiles directly or atleast make the packages selected with profiles show up in applications so u can deselect them

[Torxed]

wish it was possible to modify the profiles directly or atleast make the packages selected with profiles show up in applications so u can deselect them

In theory, we could dissect (or explode if you're a PHP developer, which I hope no one here is (calm down, that was a bad developer joke.. you have free will, use PHP if you want)) the package group.
I don't know how that would make sense UI wise.. but we could ultimately show plasma-desktop as a selection, but where you could go in and edit it (since we know what it contains after some pacman db magic)..

But I also wouldn't know what that would look like configuration file wise.. user_configuration.json might get very noisy.

[svartkanin]

I would refrain of doing some black magic with dissecting packages to be installed.
At this point it's a question of "is it really that big of a deal?". The installed system will never suit everyone out of the box as there are always opinions around what and what shouldn't be installed.

The goal is to provide a working, minimal installation. If that contains packages that are not desired I think it is reasonable to expect that a user can uninstall them. The same goes for when something is missing.

I think the main goal should be to provide a working installation that does not produce any errors.

[Tiagoquix]

The problem of the current package selection is that it removes possibly important packages. So, until we figure out what should maybe go and not go into the KDE Plasma profile, I believe we should at least revert the change to better figure it out.

I'm also in favor of having less things (e.g. I don't use Flatpak, so I'd like to uninstall it, but can't because of plasma-meta), but first we need to figure it out first.

[Torxed]

The best suggestion I have, is to coordinate with the maintainer(s) of the upstream package group themselves, and tweak those. As that would help make sane choices with the package groups.

[imshinyu]

my suggestion would be to add profile packages pre-selected inside Additional Applications so if u don't like how a profile is setup u would just deselect some of them
tho honestly i only use profiles because if u do "Minimal" it won't select polkit/graphics drivers

[Torxed]

That could perhaps be an option. The pitfall we want to avoid is that we maintain a separate list from our packaging buddies. And that old configurations become invalid if KDE etc change the required packages, and someone does --conf <old conf> and it exploads, due to missing packages or DE's becoming incomplete

[vierfach]

you can always just manually add the plasma-meta package under the applications tab, it's not too big of a deal

[pedrohqb]

Well, I think archinstall aims to be an enabler, but not a giver. So I understand not using the plasma-meta package (which can be installed during or after the installation). However, plasma-desktop package does not give an usable minimal as it does not even include screen settings. It seems not to be minimal, but lacking. HOWEVER, I think that might be resolved by Arch packaging team by giving more sensible defaults. We don't have such problems with XFCE, for example.

[svartkanin]

Additional packages is for well additional packages. If we cross reference these now with internal packages from other configurations we need to yo build a state engine for all existing set configurations. I don't think that's the point of additional packages.

[Torxed]

Weird idea, could we keep everything as-is, and create a filter-list in a subkey of the desktop profile part of the JSON, that basically just say what packages to get rid of?
That way it will automatically be backwards compatible as we say "these packages are to be removed after the DE is installed"?

[h8d13]

I would say it's better the other way around: Start from minimal (how it already is now) and only add bare essentials: plasma-pa and kscreen. This respects the minimal working philosophy better and provides more user control (who can also just edit these files directly if needed/ or custom profiles).

This also helps us keep track of what is actually in left in a file vs what is truly needed, this is also helpful to users who might have less bandwidth/storage capacity to spare. Removing stuff after installing full is not ideal