In T54943#501103, @William Reynish (billreynish) wrote:

Forgot to mention re. the render = 50% thing.

That was a somewhat useful beginner setting back before we had Cycles and viewport preview rendering. Now, to preview your scene, you longer have to press F12 - you can just see it directly in the viewport. So, while that setting had some justification in the past, that justification has vanished in 2.8 after the removal of Blender Internal.

A detail but I'll weigh in on this.
I think keeping the Render Size Percentage at 50% would better convey that the function exists and I think it's more inviting to be changed and used.

When changing the default renderer to Cycles, will this require changes in the startup scene as well?
Material and light defaults?
As I understand it is preferred to use emission meshes as lights for instance.
What are your thoughts about this?

This is a pretty big task... :)

Output path
@Andrew Price (andrewprice) @William Reynish (billrey)
I think saving to the desktop by default is a bit intrusive, but I guess it depends on what relationship people have with their desktop... :)
Isn't it customary to output stuff to the users document folder?
Like My documents/Blender on Windows and the equivalent on Mac. I haven't used Linux that much, how does it work there usually?

@Thomas Dinges (dingto) I rather think beginners will open blender, move the cursor around a few times because they want to select stuff, rotate the view a bit, then move on to a tutorial if they are still interested... :)

I think the Cycles sampling defaults should be changed from 10/10

Moved to Cycles default discussion.
Missed that one :)