Alex, Some comments and some other ideas. Hope they help :-) On do, 2003-11-20 at 10:58, Alexander Larsson wrote: > On Wed, 2003-11-19 at 23:21, Jaap A. Haitsma wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I have some comments/suggestions about the current gnome desktop in > > Fedora. (Feel free to burn the comments/suggestions in flames ;-) ) > > > > * I find the standard gnome panel at the bottom of the screen very > > clunky, because it fills up a large part of the screen. (I know I can > > auto hide it or make it smaller.) I find smaller panel (or 2 panels) > > like they use in ximian desktop See: > > http://www.ximian.com/images/screenshots/desktop/browsing-windows-network.png > > looking much more modern > > The two panels use exactly the same total amount of screen space, but I > agree that buttons on a larger panel use more space. However, its also > harder to hit the smaller buttons for people with less control and/or > eyesight, for instance older people. It's true that they occupy the same space, but according to me it looks a whole lot better.. You could also opt for just one small bar. I don't want to offend the people who have physical problems with for smaller panels, but I believe that the default desktop should be geared towards the average user. For people with physical problems there should be ideally an option that switches the desktop to a setting which is appropriate for them. > > * I find the menus Preferences, System Settings and System tools quite > > confusing. They contain many similar menu items and if you would make a > > quiz show in which of the three a certain setting should be set, I think > > the average user would not do that well. > > I'd like to suggest to have one "Configuration" (or whatever what you > > want to call it) menu, where you have two sections: user preferences > > (which sets options for the current user that is logged in) and system > > preferences (for setting system wide settings for which you need to be > > or become root) > > Does this help much though? There are still two menus that you have to > look in, and if you didn't know how to find something in the current > system, how would you know in the new? All it does is add depth to the > menu, making it harder to navigate. > > I guess for experienced linux users you'd *know* which settings need > root and which do not (because you know what underlying operations the > config tools do), but e.g. the difference between the XRandR gnome tool > that lets you change resolution without root and redhat-config-xfree > which needs root access is not at all obvious to unexperienced users. > Also, I don't see how system tools fits into the config category. > > At the core there are three types of configuration tools: > 1) Changes that affect only the current user > 2) Changes that configure the current machine (X config, network, > soundcard, etc) > 3) Configuration of system services that aren't user things, nor really > machine specific (apache server config, dns server config, database > config, etc) > > And even in category 1 there are two types of configurations, those that > are real "preferences", i.e. what the user prefers in the user > interface, but that don't affect the app working or not (colors, theme, > ui organization, etc) and "settings", things that must be set correctly > to make the software work (imap server address, http proxy address, > etc). > > The user/root split is mostly a 1 vs 2+3 split, although not perfect, > but mixing services such as apache with network settings probably don't > make things easier to find/understand. > > Getting a good organization for this is extremely hard. Much of the > problem is due to the fact that there just are so many settings, and > unfortunately many of them are pretty useless for the user. I mean, much > of the stuff of type 2 should *just work*, and need little or no > configuration. Getting as much of this working *without* config tools is > the long term goal. However, at the moment we just have to do our best > to try to organize the tools we have in the menus. > > Its important to notice that having fewer config tools is important even > for experienced users, these users have no problem understanding what > the config tools do, but they still have problems finding the right tool > if there are too many different tools. Getting rid of unnecessary > settings increses efficiency for everyone. I agree with you totally that there should less settings. My main problem with the current menus is that there are 3 menus which do settings. Once everything is setup a desktop user does not use these menus very much anymore. So I would prefer have just 1 menu that does settings. I think your 2 and 3 could be combined to one, because they do both machine specific things. The current menu Preferences does not really make clear that they are user settings/preferences. Maybe rename this to User Settings (or Preferences) So then you would have two menus System Settings and User Settings. You could maybe put this in one application: Control Center. Where you have two views: user settings and system settings. You basically switch from a listing of system settings icons to a set of user preferences icons by pushing a button or so. Just trying to help Jaap
