On Mon, 3 Dec 2001, Chris Howells wrote:
It always irritates me when I have to use a system on which the user interface has been locked down in the interests of 'security'. This is, as far as I can tell, a practice that originates from the days of Windows 95, when you had to lock down the user interface simply because the underlying system didn't provide any security itself. This is not the case with Linux; even if you leave the full user interface exposed there is very little that users can do that will affect anything beyond their own personal settings. Absolutely true. But would you really want users changing their personal settings (and possibly making a mess -> wasted time for the administrator) when they could be doing more productive things?
I have no problem with people customising their desktop. In fact, one of
Part of the issue is what consitutes "customising their desktop".
our primary schools uses this as the "introduction to the computer suite" lesson: the students are shown how to log on and how to play around with their wallpaper etc. It's a good way for them to get familiar with the
Current Linux desktops also changing source email addresses just as easy as changing wallpaper and colour schemes. This is the sort of thing I mean by a need to restrict what a user can do. IMHO there should be some things a user can change easily, there should be some things they can change with difficulty and some things a user cannot change at all. The latter is things which if altered will result in things just failing to work. But exactly which things these are may depend on both site policies and even per user. (e.g. someone who given half a chance will fiddle to the exculsion of doing any work might be best off with something they can't alter at all.) With some things there may be no "right" answer of if something is a "user" or a "system" configuration.
My view is that if users have to do anything other than (double-)click to start up an application, then this should be viewed as a bug. This is one of the major gripes I have with programs such as KDevelop that go through an extensive setup routine the first time the user runs the program. A user interface that requires you to just repeatedly click on "Next" shouldn't be there!
I agree 100% here. I'd also include things such as Star Office, Netscape, etc. Which in their default configuration attempt to generate a profile from user input where not only does the computer usually have all the information if the user makes a mistake they are going to be utterly lost. However the people who write these programs rarely appear to consider usage on a multi-user system or LAN. Thus you can end up spending quite a lot of time writing wrapper scripts so the program will "just work" when run by a user. -- Mark Evans St. Peter's CofE High School Phone: +44 1392 204764 X109 Fax: +44 1392 204763