Re: 'Switch User' action

[Mark McLoughlin <mark skynet ie>]

Hey,

On Sat, 2003-12-06 at 12:29, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:

> For what it's worth, I am not really sure that allow somebody to log in
> again as themselves with a different session on the same machine is a
> use case worth spending much time on. The number of people wanting to
> use that feature must be very small.

	Another question to consider is "Do we want to encourage this use
case?". If you stick something somewhere like the Actions menu, I think
you're making a pretty loud statement that the feature is a good idea to
use. But lets face it, unless you have a serious kick-ass machine its
only going to take a few simultaneously running copies of GNOME to make
the machine unusable. For a lot of users, that will reflect badly on
GNOME rather than being understood as a limitation of the machine.

	But I do see the "someone's locked their screen and I can't use the
machine" problem. It certainly sounds like some screensaver/display
manager integration would be nice there.

	And then the final use case I'm seeing is the "I want to let my wife
log in and check her email without logging me out" case. I reckon the
screensaver work would be sufficient for this too ... ?


	Interestingly, Sun Ray is designed with this kind of sharing usage very
much in mind. But there are two important parts to Sun Ray that make it
feasible IMHO:

	- kick-ass servers. Its understand by the people deploying Sun 
	  Ray that you need a certain amount of hardware to support N
	  users.

	  Funny though, if you don't have enough hardware to support
	  the number of users logged in and things start getting 
	  sluggish, users tend to react with "Sun Ray sucks" rather
	  than "we need a bigger server (or more servers)".

	- the whole user/session, logging in and out etc. doesn't really
	  need much explanation with Sun Ray because its embodied by 
	  something physical - the Sun Ray card. To give up your seat to
	  someone else, you merely pull out your card and walk away.


Good Luck,
Mark.