Re: "Desktop preferences" as a top-level item

[Gregory Leblanc <gleblanc linuxweasel com>]

On Thu, 2002-08-29 at 11:57, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu> writes: 
> > "Desktop Preferences" is too long to be a toplevel item, we could put it
> > in as "Preferences". I don't have a major objection to this, and agree
> > that its conceptually cleaner than having Preferences under
> > "Applications". Nils and I originally had something like this but shied
> > away for various reasons (mostly that we felt it was promoting
> > preferences to greater prominence than was useful). In retrospect I
> > think its better to put it in a top level.
> 
> I'd appreciate when rethinking this item some consideration of where
> systemwide config tools go, and where server config tools go (our
> "System Settings" and "Server Settings" in Red Hat). Everyone is
> bitching about the current layout which is:
> 
>  Preferences 
>  System Settings
>  Server Settings

I don't know about anybody else, but the distinction between these three
isn't clear to me.  So, preferences are things on my desktop that I want
to change, probably.  But changing things on my desktop could mean
changing some system-wide settings too.  Server settings is even worse. 
Is that things on my machine that I might want to change, or are those
things on my network server?  The machine that I can see those menus on
isn't a server, it's a workstation, even if it does have multiple users,
and a local webserver, and whatever else.  Most of the time things
aren't in the first place I look.  Once in a while the dice go my way,
and I find it on the first shot, but just as often, things seem to go
the other way, and I'm in the third menu before I find what I need.
	Greg

-- 
Gregory Leblanc <gleblanc linuxweasel com>