Bug#1080154: meta-gnome3: revisit gnome-initial-setup vs. gnome-tour for new trixie installations

[Jeremy Bícha]

On Fri, Aug 30, 2024 at 3:42 PM Simon McVittie <smcv at debian.org> wrote:
> As discussed on
> https://salsa.debian.org/gnome-team/meta-gnome3/-/merge_requests/12,
> after GNOME 47 has reached testing, we should check on the situation of
> gnome-initial-setup vs. gnome-tour.
>
> gnome-initial-setup is really designed to be used on first-boot of a
> freshly imaged computer, after running an installation that does not
> include most of the questions that d-i asks, with the result that it
> feels rather redundant to run it on first-login.
>
> Is there anything that g-i-s does for us, that -tour would not?

Tour is basically only a slideshow app showing a few tips about how to
use GNOME. Personally, I felt like gnome-getting-started-docs did this
better.

Initial Setup in **existing user** mode currently shows these pages:
Welcome (Choose a Language)
Typing (Choose a keyboard layout or input method)
Privacy (Location Services, which is unhelpful with the
discontinuation of Mozilla Location Services this year but it only
controlled apps which respected this setting. This page was meant to
be hidden so we would need to update the code to do that for existing
user mode.)
All Done

Therefore, it is only useful for cases where the person who installed
Debian used a different language or keyboard layout or input method
than the user who logs in.

But there are more issues:
1. The selected language isn't being set correctly by default:
https://bugs.debian.org/1079691
2. The system admin needs to manually enable the additional languages.
My Debian Testing install only shows English (United States) for
language options, both here and in Settings > System > Region &
Language

GNOME Initial Setup was at least slightly more useful in Debian 12
"Bookworm" where we included it for all users for the first time (at
least one language "task" was using it earlier): Initial Setup
included an Online Accounts screen but this was removed with GNOME 46.

Debian is the only major distro to still use GNOME Initial Setup's
original existing user mode. It was disabled upstream in I think GNOME
40. Ubuntu also currently uses GNOME Initial Setup but heavily
modified and is expected to eventually use a custom app for this
instead.

The mode described by Simon earlier is **new user** mode. This
requires the distro to not already have a regular user configured
which could be done by OEMs but is not what you'd get by running a
typical Debian install. The OEMs would need to ensure appropriate
languages are available to be selected.

There is a third mode that Fedora has been working on in conjunction
with their next generation Web UI for Anaconda (which is not used by
the latest stable Fedora yet). The **live user** mode is similar to
how we've been using existing user mode. It only exists in a draft
merge request: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-initial-setup/-/merge_requests/200

So here's the proposal:
- Remove our gnome-initial-setup patch to re-enable existing user mode
- Keep gnome-initial-setup as a Recommends in case it helps OEMs
- Add GNOME Tour to gnome-core. I think Recommends is good so that
it's easy for admins to stop showing it for new users.

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha