Re: Reprise of the panel layout proposal

[thristian atdot org]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2001 at 12:19:06PM +0200, Blad, John Erling wrote:
> James Ramsey wrote:
> >The idea is to keep the naive user out of a "mess" in
> >the first place. Bear in mind that these "messes"
> >aren't really ones that are difficult to get out of
> >per se, only ones that a naive user may not be able
> >figure out without help of some kind. For such a naive
> >user, providing a complicated way to get out of a
> >simple mess would be more confusing.
> 
> >Less is more.
> 
> Even if stopping the user from doing this is possible
> I don't know if I like the idea. I belive the right
> thing to do is to establish something that work as
> an undo feature.
> 
> M$ have a failsafe login solution and that seems right
> to me. Only problem with that is they also block any
> possibility to change the system, which somewhat
> counteracts the purpose.

MS also don't allow you to kill off the task-bar or Start menu, or the
My Computer icon from your desktop. You *can* get rid of these things
if you really want, but you have to start hacking config files
manually, the UI won't let you do it.

The MS failsafe login ("Safe mode") is for hardware failure, not "user
has broken settings". The Linux equivalent is pointing LILO at a
minimalist backup-kernel at boot time, not anything in GNOME.

Personally, I can't say I care for session-management at all. It
doesn't help the programs I run in terminal windows, and when I log
out and in I'd like a fresh, clean desktop, not the same messy one I
just left. Of course, I'm probably in the minority.

I'd much rather GNOME stop me from snookering myself accidentally than
to lose all my settings in "failsafe" mode. If I really want to delete
the last remaining copy of the Control Centre launcher from the panel,
I'll boot up the GConf equivalent of regedit and remove it myself.

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