[Mageia-dev] xguest and the display manager

Liam R E Quin liam at holoweb.net
Mon Feb 20 15:55:32 CET 2012


On Mon, 2012-02-20 at 11:59 +0100, Guillaume Rousse wrote:

> No. Configuring a user computer should be left to end-user, not to 
> packagers providing 'just click here' blackbox solutions.
One of the reaons I switched, years ago, away from Debian to Mandrake
Linux, was exactly this: debian packages tended not to work out of the
box, because they said it was the responsibility of the user to
configure them.  On Mandrake Linux, the corresponding packages had a
sensible, working, default configuration you could change if you needed
to, and sometimes even GUI tools that worked with the same text-based
conf files, so you could mix GUI and text styles.  On Red Hat Linux at
the time if you used the GUI tools they overwrote text configuration
files without reading them first, so just starting the tool was often
enough to lose manual changes.

Software should "just work" wherever possible.

Where not possible, it's the responsibility of the software provider to
make it easy to configure in a safe and secure way without the user
undergoing emotional trauma.

Don't expect to "educate" users by forcing them to learn irritating and
tedious trivia that stand between them and their job without being part
of what they actually want to learn.

Of course, this should be balanced by providing paths for people who do
want to learn.

When a book is translated, the original language, title and author must
always be given, so that if the reader wishes to learn Urdu (say) and
read the original, they can; however, most people want to read books in
languages in which they are already fluent.

Best,

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/



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