Re: Proposal for inclusion in desktop: gnome-screensaver



Hi Shaun,

Good comments.  I'll reply inline.

Shaun McCance wrote:
* On https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ScreenSaver there's the suggestion:

    ...an OS-X-like dialog shake would save having to print ugly
    "That password was incorrect" text.

I notice that you have the shake effect, but that you still have
the "ugly" text.  Please keep it that way.  I very much doubt
that our accessibility tools can say "the dialog is shaking its
head 'NO' at you."

I plan to keep the text. I've found that some people don't intuit that the shake means no.

* The timeout when you type an incorrect password is very long.

Yes it is. I found that some novice and show users weren't able to notice, read, and understand the error message text before the dialog disappeared. It used to be quite a short timeout but I extended it recently. Perhaps, I've extended it too much.

* Same wiki page:

    Use the gdm login screen for switching accounts, and tidy it up.

I've long held that XP got the interaction right.  There's just one
login screen.  Unlocking your screen is just logging back in again.
Switching users is just logging in.

Right now, we have the OS X interaction: We have a login screen
and a separate unlock dialog.  The unlock dialog has a button to
switch users, which takes you to another login dialog.  Ideally,
I'd like to see an effort to make gdm the One True Login Screen,
regardless of whether you're logging in for the first time or
unlocking a running session.

I agree in part. Unfortunately, it gets a bit complicated both technically and politically.

If user switching is not enabled then using a display manager as an unlock dialog doesn't make much sense. It will involve more time and more user interaction to unlock the screen. In the short term I expect that many vendors will ship with user switching off by default until we can solve all the problems with device ownership.

At the moment we can't require GDM to be present and running in order to lock the screen. The vendor may use another DM or no DM at all.

We must also take care that the locked screen is never a dead end for the user. This is important. Consider what happens if the user does a VT switch either by using FUSA, GDM, manually by keyboard, or by accident. The user will end up at someone's locked screen. There must be a way for the user to get back home to their VT.

I think in the long run we can integrate FUSA, GDM, and gnome-screensaver better but we have some more work to do.

* As long as we have the model we have now, the user-switching
dialog needs love.  Right now, it displays a list of all the
users.  The list is tall enough to accommodate about 1.2 users.
I regularly use a machine that has hundreds of users.  That's
not a fun list to scroll through.

Most of the time if you have a face image showing on the other page then you will be able to see more users at a time.

I am also in a system with hundreds of users so I understand. You can use gtktreeview type-ahead find to speed up your searches. On my system I can find my user name in two keypresses and one mouse click. This is much faster than typing my entire username.

* And on that note, I'm a keyboard-happy kind of person.  I'm
a big fan of just typing my username.  I think face browsers
are great for small home installations.  But there needs to
be a way to type.

You are probably right.  I'll think about how to add this.

* And on that note, there needs to be a way to disable the
face browser entirely.  In a lot of settings, sysadmins don't
want to show a list of all users to people who might not even
have accounts on the machines.

The user switching is off by default. It must be enabled by setting the GConf key /apps/gnome-screensaver/user_switch_enabled to TRUE.

* You've hidden quite a lot of options.  All well and good.
But we can't just hide things that people use, unless we've
really provided a better system.  Case in point, I actually
use the setting for when to lock the screen after it's blanked.
Removing that setting annoys me, unless you make it Just Work
so I don't need the setting anymore.

I've heard this complaint before. I think there is another possibility besides adding such an option.

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309142

Anyway, just my 2�.  I'm glad somebody is finally tackling
this issue.  Keep up the good work.

Thanks for the excellent questions.

Jon



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