[Mageia-dev] xguest and the display manager

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/
+
+