GNOME’s initial setup assistant was originally introduced in 3.8. It helps people set up GNOME 3 when they first log into a new session, and guides them through the essential steps to make their account usable. It enables you to set a language and the date and time, and it helps you to connect to a network and to online accounts.

Without something like initial setup, there’s a risk that a new user might be faced with a system that isn’t using their language or has the wrong time. Hunting through settings on a misconfigured system is not what we want people’s’ first experience of GNOME 3 to be.

From a design and development standpoint, one of the tricky things about initial setup is that it doesn’t get a huge amount of attention. Those of us who work on GNOME don’t see it on regular basis and our users only…