Re: [Usability] user levels, etc.

[Gregory Merchan <merchan phys lsu edu>]

On Mon, Nov 12, 2001 at 03:06:24PM -0500, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> An idea we've been tossing around at Red Hat and was also discussed
> some at ALS: rather than user levels, let's just remove overly
> advanced/confusing prefs from the UI entirely, and have a special
> power user control panel that exposes the most common ones, and for
> really wacky settings people can use a generic GConf editor app or
> gconftool. Windows takes a similar approach, I'm told you can get a
> power-tweaker application that lets you set the weird stuff.
> 
> Rationale:
> 
>   - user levels should not be Nautilus-only, should be global or 
>     not at all, so we need a desktop-wide plan

I concur.

>   - user levels are probably too complex for most apps to implement 
>     correctly, given that my recent lengthy post on how to do 
>     prefs didn't even consider the user level issue, and in fact
>     people are consistenly confused about how this works in Nautilus

I don't like this argument. Making a proper application with just xlib calls
is complex (well, maybe impossible) so we wrap the complexity in layers.
Throw them out because they suck, not because they are hard to do. ;-)

>   - we could make it easier to do user levels via gconf native 
>     support, but it still would not be totally automatic, 
>     and I'm not sure gconf needs more implementation complexity
>     anyway

And user levels suck anyway. Spend more time fixing metacity instead.

>   - the "power tweak app" solution passes the KISS test and should 
>     work pretty well

Let somebody else do it. Real power users touch magnetic pins to the disks
when they want to tweak something.

>   - apps can also use Advanced tabs or disclosure triangles as
>     appropriate, to complement the power tweak app

We need a good disclosure triangle widget and a simple api so it isn't too
easily abused. (I know of two people who have considered or started writing
one.)

> Opinions?

Let's be rid of user levels.


Cheers,
Greg Merchan