Yes. FYI you can leave out the activities bit, at the sprint we agreed that it would be simpler to make the KCM apply to the current activity only

If you want to make it official, would you be interested in helping to make tiling a part of KWin directly? https://invent.kde.org/plasma/kwin/-/issues/10
If it's bult-in then more integration could be done, for example with effects and the current quick tile system.

I don't mean activities, I mean actual monitors. The view should then look something like in the Display Configuration settings page:

Yes, virtual desktop is the limited one and activities are more encompassing - neither handles multiple monitors at all though.

I think that putting all the background settings in one place makes sense.
I am missing the option to choose a monitor on all of the (otherwise well looking) mockups though. Maybe putting the workspace/activity selection on the left and putting the monitors where the workspaces are in the mockup could work?

I just tried setting the popup height to max...
In order to enable or disable the WiFi I need to move the mouse from the bottom to the top, and to switch categories the same again.
It makes quick operations take more time. There's also the problem of how to put the side bar:
If the panel is on the left or right then putting it right next to the panel looks weird and putting it on the opposite side destroys usability.

I agree with this point of view. Most elements are currently designed to work best with the current layout, so changing the layout would probably result in a worse UX. However, if it can be ensured that the UX will still be great then I think this might be beneficial. Just note that this will probably cause some more maintenance overhead and complicate visual changes to components a bit since they need to be considered in all layouts.

where just clicking configure on the actual wallpaper one needs to change requires no mental mapping, it's just there.

I think the button has a good reason to be really visible exactly because it will only be used by beginners, hiding it would make it more difficult for them to discover the feature.
I agree though that taking up vertical space from the sidebar isn't great and if we do use a button it should optimally be somewhere else... I don't see a good alternative though.

I agree that the Home page looks very good but that it would be good to make it a bit more dynamic as well. Maybe simply rotating around the images of the singular apps on different times for different apps would do the trick (as opposed to rotating around apps, which is IMHO mostly not a good idea except in preview panels like on the top).

My point is that a simple list with KCMs that have any changed values in them wouldn't be overly useful.
Can we log when a setting has been changed / when a KCM had its last change? Then we could show the user a list with KCMs where they last made changes, in order of when they were made. A UI for that would perhaps then even be as easy as showing a "last changed" list under the "Frequently Used" on the home screen of system settings.

I feared that the overview isn't easily possible. Would it be feasable to show a list of KCMs that have non-default values? I'm not sure how useful that would be though, if the user would already know the setting they're searching for is in a particular KCM they probably would've found it themselves.

I know this is a bit outside the scope of this task but maybe a backup & restore page with a reset button would be good? This page would of course have to have appropriate warnings but it would probably help some users if they could

• get an overview of all settings they changed, with a list of links to the actual settings pages?
• backup their configuration
• restore old configurations
• reset all settings

This would enable users to freely experiment with the settings without the fear of breaking something / toggling some behaviours they'll not find again. Just back up and everything's safe.
Backups into a file then that would also easily allow users to synchronize their settings from PC to PC without needing to copy their whole home or .config folder (possibly integrate KDE Connect here?).
I definitely agree that a reset button is dangerous but I think if we display appropriate warnings and require the user to put in their password then it should be just fine. After all, how many users have accidentally reset their Android phone?

I think it may be rather important to have a preview visible of how the screens look like with the new wallpaper setup - this would be easily achieved if we showed the screen setup above the grid. I fear that you're completely right however that it's just too much in one page.

I think the UI you described would be great. Do you think having the content of the dialog would be too much to have in the main page? IMHO it's always better to not split up a settings page if avoidable. The question is whether or not it then actually fits into a page.

+1 for this idea :)

I personally always use the IOTM, on a panel on the left. The panel is always scaled exactly so the system tray icons are in two columns. I'm also very fond of the present windows effect when you click on a grouped application icon - recognizing the window I need and switching to it is 10x faster and easier simply due to size than on Windows, where one only gets the small window previews.
The IOTM in total is a lot faster than a TTM because with a TTM one has to read the labels - with the IOTM you get visual indicators all the way, big icons for the app and then the window content itself for the actual window switching. The consistency of the position of apps on the TM is also a bonus on usability and speed.

This could potentially be very useful for laptops as well - I don't think automatic suspending of apps would be wanted there but lazy loading of services and manual suspending of apps could make it easier to save power.
What I would have in mind for manual suspend of apps would be a suspend button in the window decorations which would suspend the app and hide the window. Once it's un-minimized by the user then we'd wake the app up automatically.