Re: GNOME Development Series Addition

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sat, Apr 12, 2003 at 03:02:48PM -0400, Erik Pukinskis wrote:
> 
> There are four types of users:
> 
> A) Users of single user machines [1]
> B) Users of multi-user machines without an admin [2]
> C) Users of multi-user machines with an admin [3]
> D) Administrators of multi-user machines
> 
> Of these four, the only group who need access to system-wide preferences
> is group D.  For group A, they are the only ones using the machine, so
> single user preferences *are* system wide.  For group B, no one has the
> authority or desire to set system-wide preferences.  And for group C,
> the admin doesn't want to allow them to set system-wide preferences.
> 
> Thus 99% of users have no use for system-wide preferences, and the ones
> that do are admins.  For this reason, it seems to me that all of these
> applets should set preferences for just the current user.  The
> system-wide preferences can be accessed from a separate app that allows
> admins to control the usage parameters of the machine in general.  This
> app could also include things like security lock-down settings.
> 

I'm almost convinced, that seems like a very sane argument. One thing
that I'm not convinced on is hardware configuration. Do I really want
to configure my video card driver once per user?

Havoc