Using the 'plasma' package group for the plasma desktop profile

[georgemoodier]

Thanks for raising this BUT it is somewhat controversial and will definitely steer some opinions.
It'd would probably be better to raise an issue so this can be discussed there but I'll leave some thoughts here.

Firstly, if this is the way forward then to keep things in line I'd suggest to make all profiles use their dedicated groups if available otherwise there is going to be a lot of inconsistencies.

Looking at the included packages https://archlinux.org/groups/x86_64/plasma/ this may somewhat overlap and maybe conflict with existing settings, such as kpipewire, bluedevil being some that will now be installed automatically which makes the specific settings for them counter intuitive as not selecting anything there makes things confusing.

I'm not against it as it would remove the endless discussions of which packages to install and which are not needed as archinstall just pushes that responsibility then to the packaging maintainers (which will not be pleased as @Torxed pointed out to me in the past :) )

Originally posted by @svartkanin in #3794 (comment)

Thanks for the detailed answer!

I raised this issue for the exact reason of consistency between all other DEs that happen to also have package groups. I think their flexibility compared to -metapacakges gives them an advantage (e.g. being able to uninstall extra packages that are simply part of a DEs app suite.)

speaking of flexibility, i think we could simply tackle conflicting packages by either rewriting the installer so that it only installs part of the group, or using a scriptlet that removes parts that are unnecessary or conflicting with the user's chosen settings (e.g. bluetooth was disabled -> remove bluedevil.) I myself am not fully content with the plasma package group as it has packages that are completely pointless to me (kwin-x11, for example, which i believe isn't even usable by default because the group doesn't ship plasma-x11-session.)

I would be interested to see if anyone else is interested further in this decision.