[gnome-love] Re: GNOME user environment brainstorming

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Glynn Foster <glynn foster ireland sun com> writes:
> > Windows has My Computer in addition to the start menu which contains
> > things like Control Panel, Dial-up Networking, etc.
>
> I'm very much for splitting desktop settings and preferences up from 
> system settings. On a network, users shouldn't have access to sytem
> stuff - if this was somehow conditionally shown depending on whether
> the user was root or not
> If you start showing new users to the desktop all this stuff, they are
> going to start getting confused very quickly.

Right, so our thought is to have two folders:

 Havoc Pennington's Preferences
 System Settings

Good idea to be smart about simply not displaying system settings in
some situations.
 
> There was some talk at GUADEC about removing non-useful applets from 
> the core and I completely agree. What about having some proviso that
> the appets are a) useful b) run on all platforms that support GNOME?

Well, criterion a) would eliminate Wanda the Fish, which is blatantly
unacceptable ;-)
 
> I think it would also be pretty neat, and in some cases essential, that
> the system admin could completely lock down GNOME configuration wise...
> so that no user could configure his/her own desktop. I can just see this
> being really useful in large companies with evil system admins :)

GConf does allow this, more or less... though apps have to actually
call gconf_is_writable() or whatever it's called and properly
desensitize the options in the GUI, and I'm sure none of them
will. ;-)

Havoc