Ahoi! I was hoping we can have a bikeshed discussion about KInfoCenter :)
The past couple of weeks I've been spending some time on KIC and what became apparent quickly is that I have not the faintest idea who the application is for, or when/how one would use it. That makes it nigh impossible to say whether a wish fits into the vision of the application, or even where to take the application in the future in general. For example the OpenGL module.... It's a treeview of data you'll approximately find in glxinfo (+some additional data on EGL and GLU). Costs about 800 SLOC and requires next to no maintenance. On paper that's grand. But who of our design personas would use it for what purpose? [1] Who would use it for anything other than maybe looking at the backing kernel module? Or perhaps more importantly: even if we assume that **someone** who's not necessarily part of the personas finds this information useful: Why ever would they use the GUI to look at that when they can get this information out of the glxinfo tool which then also allows them to apply processing to the output, to, for example, grep for what they want to know? The GUI has all the disadvantages of the CLI tool (dump of all remotely extractable information even when 99% is useless noise) without any of the advantages that you naturally get with from being on a terminal (piping every which way to mold the data). So, what is it good for? This applies to most modules really. Take a look at the Interrupts module or the PCI module. I don't see a casual user going there (cause it's daunting technobabble), a power user likely wouldn't go there either (cause it's inferior to terminal tools), that kinda leaves the in-betweens. But why would they look at this data? What would they do with it? What's the use case? In lieu of an explanation for KIC's "reason to be", as it were, what do we think KIC should be? Why shouldn't its useful functionality not part of system settings, or possibly ksysguard? For example the new smb module I wrote [2] could easily have 'add/remove share' and 'mount/unmount share' functionality, it'd be way more useful that way, but then it's suddenly a settings module... Meanwhile the advanced memory information of the Memory module seems to largely replicate information we already have in ksysguard, and when looking at this data it entirely stands to reason that if I see that I'm low on RAM I may want to know what is eating it and possibly kill it. In short: KIC makes me go "???" and, thinking back, it always has. It's nice to look at and feel like a hacker but its functionality eludes me. (looking at it and feeling like a hacker may be entirely worthwhile, but then I'd revisit the code cost of the modules and make them text views of CLI tool output directly) [1] https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Workspace_Sprint/Personas [2] https://phabricator.kde.org/file/data/csr6d4o5h5cdl23zqm6h/PHID-FILE-tij25pcl4cajzm4bfdbo/Screenshot_20200131_132853.png HS
