I would like a way to set KDE defaults for new users. Is there an easy way to do this? I know I can copy .kde from a dummy user I preconfigured, maybe even script that into the new user process, but I'd prefer to have a set of files somewhere that KDE pulls for new users. Can this be done without recompiling KDE? I know various distros (Slackware, SUSE) have different defaults than the Debian default (which I think are the bare KDE defaults) but of course they alter the source. I'd tend to shy aware from having to recompile KDE everytime something is updated (and probably have to change my patches as well) as I tend to keep KDE rather up to date. If anyone knows a way to do this, i.e. there is an defaults.conf like file somewhere in the /etc/kde3 structure it would be most appreciated.

You can put your default configuration files in /etc/skel and they will be copied to a new users home directory.

Thanks, that solves a good deal of my problem. However, it doesn't address users blowing out their .kde directories. I now know that what I want to adjust is the Kpersonalizer (the intial KDE config wizard) defaults. Any clues on how to set them? I think it has to do with kpersonalizerrc, but I can't seem to find any good documentation for that.

The best people to ask your questions are the KDE developers. You can join their mailing list or chat with them via IRC (details are vailable on kde.org).

By the way after reading your initial post again, I just wanted to let you know that most distros don't actually alter the KDE source in order to have specific default settings and you do not need to recompile KDE. All they do is tinker with various config settings and then put the files in /etc/skel/.kde. If a user were to mess up their .kde and you wanted to return it to the default all you would do is copy the right config file from /etc/skel/.kde and place it in their ~/.kde directory.

Do you mean that the user's desktop icons will reappear at next boot even if they have removed them?

If so, Berry Linux uses a script called
/etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/xdesktop.sh to do that.

I don't have the icon issue, sorry. I just wanted to be able to tell people to rm -fr ~/.kde* and get a nice new default set of KDE settings from the wizard if they had issues.

However, I realized it was easier to just tell them to copy the new user .kde from /etc/skel to their home and chown than to reconfigure Kpersonalizer to give them new defaults as it isn't documented at all and apparently after talking on the KDE forums something which is undergoing lots of work so I'd have a lot of issues finding which settings apply to my version. Basically its not worth it to bug actual KDE devs (the only way to get the info.) for just that.