I’ve figured out why Ubuntu’s configuration system bugs me.
Why is there a “Preferences” and “Administration” section in a drop-down menu?
Now.. is setting my screen resolution a preference or an admin thing? My guess would be admin… nope, it’s a preference.. like every user on the machine is going to have a preference about their screen res.. sure, I’m sold on that idea.
Muppets.
Please just put all these things under Settings like on a Mac.. and not items in a drop down menu.
There are some good reasons why it was initially implemented so. Preferences was for things only applicable to the user, and didn’t require sudo. Administration is for system-wide things that does require sudo. The idea is that if a user isn’t in the admin group, then the Administrator menu wouldn’t appear either.
While the current menu layout is certainly not ideal, many people specifically are against any kind of settings-center/control-panel/etc for gnome. Ons has been developed for Gnome, and at one point it was going to be the default for Feisty, but people argued against it and it got dropped.
Personally I think the menus could work great if it was just simplified and was more intuitive. Usually you probably want to change just one setting so making even more clicks and launching a settings manager just seems wasteful and inefficient to me.
On the screen resolution for each user… I actually know some Windows users who change the resolution each time another user logs in. The younger people in the house wants more pixels and they view it as 1280×1024, and the older people in the house set it to 1024×768. I’ve also seen old people before who set their resolution on laptop screens as large as 15.4″ to 800×600, which would personally break my sanity. Point is, there are actually use cases where users might want to set a different resolution just for themselves, which is also just dumb on LCD’s since you probably always want to match the native resolution, so there should really be a better way to set screen font and size, but I’m going to stop now before I get into how broken Gnome’s font settings are.
Hey J
I get that launching a central settings thing may not be guru-friendly.. but I’m pretty sure the Apple guys have figured out that the most user-friendly way is to have all the settings in one place.
..for humans and all that.
I like Ubuntu, but I find myself hacking under the hood a bit too often.. for things which I often don’t think are power-user needs.
You’re right that users have to look “under the hood” too often in Ubuntu, but that has been getting better over time and I believe it will continue to do so.
Apple has gotten things wrong too, nothing’s perfect.