RE: 2.4: System Tools - Please try them

[Mark Finlay <sisob eircom net>]

> "Boot" - maybe useful, but probably not something you'd have as a
> seperate dialogue in a perfect world.

Well in a perfect world no-one would be dual booting, but the fact is
that pretty much everyone who installs linux nowadays is familiar with
the idea of a boot manager. That makes this a really useful tool IMHO.

> "Runlevel" - A *services* focused dialogue would be awesome, much like
> RH presents under "setup" where you can click and turn things on and
> off. Mixing this with the traditional unix runlevels, and presenting it
> as such in the menus, is confusing and gets in the way of what people
> usually want to do, which is just to turn something on or off.

I agree that the idea of runlevels should be hidden from non-advnaced
user. There are very few people who want something enabled in runlevel 3
and not in runlevel 5.

But I don't think that this requires any massive changes to the tool.
The way it works now is that it only shows the current runlevel by
default. To me this is pretty much the functional equivelent to just
showing on off by default. The main problem with the dialog is the
cryptic lightbulbs.

> "Time" - great, but maybe doesn't need a menu item and should be just
> under the right click menu of the clock applet.

I think having it both places would be good..

> In general I'm not sure having these all under a "System Tools" category
> is what we want. System Tools (i.e. things requiring root access) can be
> of very different natures. As I've suggested before the best approach
> might be to provide a "requires root access" emblem, or to use a special
> icon style for items requiring root access (like Black and White or
> something). Also the amount of time the applets take to start up (esp.
> w/ the scanning system stuff) is a little irritating, but maybe there's
> no way to work around that and still keep system abstraction...

IMHO this stuff is not on gnome-system-tools plate. Once we've fixed the
gnome menus the gnome-system-tools can fit in very easily. So the
questions is really "Can we commit to fixing Desktop Preferences by
2.4?", if not then we may have trouble fitting the gst in.

> I'd like us to consider the gst as items for inclusion, but in a future
> release of GNOME when more of their usability issues can be resolved
> (and to work more closely with the gst folk to specify what we
> want/need, how they should fit in with the desktop prefs, etc). 

I think that if we can fix the lightbulb issue with the current tools,
and fix the gnome menus they could be fixed now. 

On the other hand I'd love to see them in 2.6 with a modem dialer, a
fixed "services" editor, and modem dialer with notification area support
and maybe some other tools - like being able to choose the system
language or keybaord.

Also if we get libgnomesu working in the 2.6 timeframe we could
serviously look at, as you say, making "Gnome the Operating system".
And hiding implementation details from the user (eg. Having a user
keyboard tool and a root keyboard tool)

-- 
Mark Finlay <sisob eircom net>