After acquiring or installing a new system there are a few essential things to set up before use. Initial Setup aims to provide a simple, easy, and safe way to prepare a new system. This should only include a few essential steps for which we can't provide good defaults. The desired experience is that the system boots straight into Initial Setup, and when the setup tasks are completed, we smoothly transition into the user session for the newly-created user account.

There are two modes.

When there are no existing user accounts on the system, gdm launches Initial Setup in a special initial setup session that runs GNOME Shell with a somewhat reduced UI, similar to the way it is used on the login screen. In this mode, Initial Setup will create a new user account. By default, all pages except Welcome are displayed:

• Language
• Keyboard
• Network
• Privacy
• Timezone
• Software (currently only used by Fedora)
• Account
• Password
• Parental Controls (if malcontent is enabled)
• Parent Password (if malcontent is enabled)
• Summary

There are some deficiencies with this mode. First, some pages are redundant with distro installers. Linux distros do not want to prompt the user to configure the same thing multiple times. Distros have to suppress particular pages using the vendor.conf file (discussed below). For example, Fedora's vendor.conf suppresses the Language and Keyboard pages when in new user mode, and suppresses the Timezone page always, to avoid redundancy with its Anaconda installer. The Welcome page is displayed whenever the Language page is suppressed via vendor.conf. Second, the new user mode will be used for both regular and OEM installs, because there is no separate OEM mode. When pages are suppressed to avoid redundancy with distro installers, OEM installs suffer because there users never run the installer and therefore never receive the suppressed pages. In the future, we should create a separate OEM mode to fix this.

Initial Setup has code to support running when logging into a new user account for the first time. Confusingly, this is called existing user mode, but it makes sense if you think "the user already exists and Initial Setup does not need to create it." Although the code exists, it is actually impossible to ever access existing user mode as of Initial Setup 40. This mode was entirely disabled in https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-initial-setup/-/merge_requests/113 to avoid conflicting with GNOME Tour. It would be nice to bring it back, but to do so, we would want to fix https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-initial-setup/-/issues/12. Historically, existing user mode runs in the normal user account session, but we really need it to run in the same special initial setup session that is used for new user mode. Otherwise, the Language page does not actually work; the locale has to be set before launching the normal user session, and cannot be changed once the session has started. Since the code still exists, it is worth documenting here even though it is currently unreachable.

When running in existing user mode, the Timezone, Software, Account, Password, Parental Controls, and Parent Password pages are all disabled because they do not make sense in this mode. This results in the following workflow:

• Language
• Keyboard
• Network
• Privacy
• Summary

Although this mode is unreachable in the upstream version of Initial Setup, both Debian and Ubuntu have downstream patches to restore it.

Some aspects of Initial Setup's behaviour can be overridden through a vendor configuration file.

By default, Initial Setup will try to read configuration from $(sysconfdir)/gnome-initial-setup/vendor.conf (i.e. /etc/gnome-initial-setup/vendor.conf in a typical installation). If this file does not exist or cannot be read, Initial Setup will read $(datadir)/gnome-initial-setup/vendor.conf (i.e. /usr/share/gnome-initial-setup/vendor.conf). The intention is that distributions will provide their configuration (if any) in the latter file, with the former used by administrators or hardware vendors to override the distribution's configuration.

For backwards-compatibility, a vendor-conf-file option can be passed to meson configure. If specified, Initial Setup will only try to read configuration from that path; neither of the default paths will be checked.

Here's a (contrived) example of what can be controlled using this file:

[pages]
# Never show the timezone page
skip=timezone
# Don't show the language and keyboard pages in the 'first boot' situation,
# only when running for an existing user
existing_user_only=language;keyboard
# Only show the privacy page in the 'first boot' situation
new_user_only=privacy

GNOME Initial Setup is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. See the COPYING file for details.