User Managment

[Daniel Borgmann <daniel liebesgedichte net>]

Hello,

are there any plans to improve user managment?
I think this is a big problem currently of GNOME. Unix user managment
works great on the console, but there doesn't seem to be a convenient
replacement for "su" on the desktop. This has a critical effect, as it
forces home users either to rely on the terminal for certain tasks
(don't tell me that a user never ever has to touch anything but his
$HOME) or run as root all the time (or relogin as root for every single
task). And as it is always suggested _not_ to use the root account in X,
this is a problem.
I asked someone to explain me how Apple solved it in OS X as I figured
they would face the same problem. He told me that users can be
"administrators" and the first user is an administrator by default.
However, administrators still can't hose the filesystem, so it's not the
"root" account. But they can do things on the GUI like installing
software or changing the root and other user's passwords. Whenever they
try to change systemfiles (in finder most probably), they are asked for
this root password. And of course they can do sudo on the console (or su
but this seems to be disabled by default). 
Is there a chance that we see something like this in the near future in
GNOME? I see a lot of people complaining that one of the problems of
GNU/Linux on the desktop still is, that you can't do everything from the
GUI. This might not be important for total beginners or companies (as
they have administrators for this task), but for the typical desktop
poweruser it certainly is.


- Daniel