Re: GNOME Development Series Addition

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Fri, Apr 11, 2003 at 04:27:35PM +0100, Matthew Allum wrote:
> I agree the resolution stuff better belongs in a dialog. Is it harmful
> for it to be in the applet as well ? Some users may have a need to
> change there screen resolution quickly - I dunno. 

It's only harmful if the applet and the dialog don't set the same 
configuration option in gconf. 

> If no-ones already done it, it'd be pretty trivial for me to hack
> dialog together. Though I havn't thought much on where you'd store the
> selected resolution between sessions. 

That's the hard part. ;-) 

There's in fact a tricky UI issue here. If you have a copy of Red Hat
8/9 it might help for visualizing the problem.

You have System Settings->Display - it might seem natural to change
resolution in there. But that's going to change the global default for
all users.

So say we add Preferences->Display - ignoring for the moment that we
*have too damn many control panels again* ;-) - it's probably
confusing to have two things labeled Display.

There's no real evidence that users understand the difference between 
System Settings and Preferences and in fact I doubt they do.

This is sort of a general issue that comes up over and over, how do we
show the system defaults vs. the per-user setting. I think the
approach of pretending UNIX is a single-user system is broken;
multiuser is one of the main benefits of the OS, and you can see
Windows XP moving toward making multi-user more visible over time.

In large deployments, a simple thing is to make it easy for admins to
turn off all the "system settings" type stuff for most users.  But
that doesn't address home users or laptops.

Anyhow, every time I look at the RandR GUI I get bogged down in the
need for a big picture Coherent Master Plan on this topic. 

Havoc