Re: [Usability]User competency level selection

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Tue, Nov 12, 2002 at 12:25:12AM -0500, Mathew Johnston wrote:  
> Are these ideas valid? I just want to have a powerful desktop
> environment that I can wield with my advanced user power :) I understand
> the need for a nice simple clean UI for beginners, but as advanced users
> yourselves, please understand my desire for extra flexability. 
> 
> And hey, if someone else already suggested this, let me know, and I'll
> go spend some time searching the archives (I didn't do that first,
> because in my experience, its usually faster just to post than it is to
> hunt, and if its been covered, someone will say so rather quickly :)

It's been covered a few dozen times. ;-)

User levels don't work for a lot of reasons (maybe someone saved the
link to the threads where this was best discussed). They just did not
work. It was an idea that bombed badly in practice.

We do still have a plan for hidden config options. Right now they're
available only in gconf-editor, but the idea is that someone could
easily write a little app similar to the Windows XP "TweakUI" app that
would basically be a control center providing access to all the hidden
options. This is a *trivial* app to write - just a Glade file and some
gconf glue. But no one has done it yet.

Note, of the reasons excess config options can be harmful, some of
them have to do with confusing novice users, but others are about the
existence of those options, not whether they are visible. In
particular, silly options keep people from fixing defaults even if
they are hidden, and they can make testing, QA, design, and
implementation much more complex even if (more so if) they are hidden.

If you have a specific UI problem, please file a bug or post to the
list explaining it in concrete terms, and people will try to solve
it. If a config option is the best solution then we'll use that. But
please file the *problem* (e.g. "I find that it's less efficient to do
XYZ") as the bug, rather than a particular solution. In many cases
people have demanded a specific config option at great length, and
then we patched things to just work, and the demands stopped. Not
always possible, but should always be tried. Understand the problem
and evaluate all possible solutions.

Havoc