Re: Trivial suggestions for enhancement

[Tobias Wolf <towolf gmail com>]

On Mi, 2008-07-23 at 13:03 +0300, Nick Palamarchuk wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 8:42 PM, Rui Tiago Cação Matos
> <tiagomatos gmail com> wrote:
>         On 21/07/2008, Tobias Wolf <towolf gmail com> wrote:
>         
>         99% of people (i.e. non-geeks) don't even know what an IP
>         address is...
>         
>         Rui
>  
> 99% of people don't know what is Linux )

Thanks for the input.
To give closure to this spur of offtopic-ness, 99% of people are linear
combinations of the stereotypes of grandma and the kernel hacker, and
the rest are formed by luddites like the unabomber who don't plan to use
NM in the future. Even the pure grandma will appreciate that your
question "But did you receive the right IP Address? Check..." will not
be followed by "Terminal ... mumble ... ifcnfg".
This question was one of the first questions I had to ask -- back when I
was running the private DSL for 25 fellow students -- when someone new
called and gave me the "Internet no worky" complaint. Usually this meant
I had to walk up there because there was no way to talk them through
four layers of nested Windows networking GUI ("Right-click down there,
lower right, no, right mouse button, yes, Connection Status, then change
tab, then Advanced, now Details, ah, we have to enable DHCP,
right-click, down...").
This leads to:

>So i think Tobias has a right idea. Usability of NM menu is far from
>ideal.

I would say it's a lot closer to the ideal networking GUI than anything
else I've seen so far. Especially the 0.7 cycle brought many nice
improvements like the nm-connection-editor, which gives clearly arranged
access to all connection types.
I was merely proposing a few logical changes to wording and layout that
are possible for 0.7 still. The point of the sidenote in my last email
was that I observed that there's two ways now to edit the VPN config.
Via the right-click menu item, and via the VPN submenu. The submenu
stems from the NM 0.6x times when there was no nm-c-e yet.

Meanwhile, there are two more settings I would like to discuss:

1. "System setting" -- Is it clear enough what this does? How about
   "System-wide connection"?
2. "MAC address:" -- Is this to spoof the MAC (no), or is it to limit
   the connection to the NIC specified by its MAC here (yes)?

What about adding bubble help for these? People would have to ask fewer
questions on mailing lists and forums, right?

--Tobias