Re: 'Switch User' action

[Mark McLoughlin <mark skynet ie>]

Hi Rodrigo,

On Fri, 2003-12-05 at 17:11, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Attached is a patch that implements the 'Switch User' action, making
> that show up both on the 'Actions' Menu, and on the 'Actions' applet
> menu. It just misses an icon for it.
> 
> I don't know what people think about this, and if this is really enough
> for fast user switching, but I wanted to send it to see what people
> think.
> 
> If this goes in, I think gdmflexiserver should be changed to allow the
> user to choose an already existing session from a nice and simple
> dialog.
> 
> So, what do people think?

	Well, there are two questions, really:

  1) Is gdmflexiserver as it stands suitable for this ?
  2) Is putting this in the Actions menu a good idea ?

	I'll only answer the second as I'm running an oldish version of gdm and
what I'm seeing may be better now. When I ran it I thought it had just
crashed my Xserver :-)


	I guess the things you need to look at when deciding whether or not
something should go into the Actions menu are[1]:

  + Is it something that a large proportion of the user base will do
    pretty regularly?

      In this case, I think not - surely, most users will only ever use
      one account? And even if we thought a lot of users use more than
      one account, surely switching between accounts wouldn't be that
      common ?

  + Is it a confusing feature ?

      Again, in this case, no matter how well we implement it, I think
      the concepts might turn out to be too confusing to put it in
      such a highly visible place. "Switch User ... do you mean logout
      and let someone else take my seat?"

      For this same reason, I have a hard time believing that we'll ever
      clean up the whole concept of session management well enough to
      have "Save Session" in the menu. The Actions menu is not the best
      place to hide something :-)


	So, I'm skeptical, but as always, I'm interested to here other
opinions.

Thanks,
Mark.

[1] - This is a completely different question from "Should we implement
this functionality". The Actions menu is highly, highly visible.
Anything in it *will* be noticed by users and because its such valuable
real estate, it has to fall into the frequent-by-many category.