Comments on: Control Center in System Settings?

By: a.k.m

a.k.m — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 07:01:06 +0000

IMHO we should look at tasma(Pardus) how they have customised systemsettings with user and administrator modules and design…many are saying it can do mostly everything mcc/yast can do. Well still now it is in development so some features are not there. But including so many features doesnt make it bloated with 80 icons….Because they designed it well…..nd its pardus’s one of the greatest strengths

By: thorGT

thorGT — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 00:00:03 +0000

Coming back to the YaST/System Settings: the problem here seems to be much deeper than a simple design/usability issue. It seems that in linux (here, opensuse), the operating system is separated from the desktop, so that only provides a backend for the desktop. So then there come OS settings and desktop settings, and the OS and the desktop appear to know almost nothing about each other (well, that’s what I see in our case with two settings). But the user want an integrated workspace and a unified settings tool. This means that we need unified efforts from both the desktop and OS developers, which have to work in sync at least in such cases(or they already do? I really don’t know). (Well, this may be out of topic (general OS design), but don’t we see examples of unified OS/desktop in Linux? sure we do) And btw this exact problem is why they have only one system settings in Apple/M$.

By: Teo

Teo — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 19:39:29 +0000

You might be interested in this Bug Report: http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=153556 There’s a lot of people who dislike System Settings and strongly oppose the political pressure that has pushed Kubuntu’s System Settings upstream into KDE4 in place of KDE3’s KControl. At that time KControl was already half ported to KDE4 IIRC. The “usability studies” behind System Settings are questionable at best, and while I admit KControl wasn’t perfect, having System Settings in KDE4 instead of KControl is a real regression. Do you see the possibility of having an interface like KControl for YaST that loads kcmodules too? Or maybe a patch to System Settings to add a treeview?

By: Thomas Thym

Thomas Thym — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:54:48 +0000

Some weeks ago I found the following document from the gnome community about the design of the system setting dialog. They compare the Vista, OS X and Kubuntu dialogs and add their own ideas at the end. I think it might not be the worst thing to have a look and think about a comparable design for Linux Desktop Environments.

http://live.gnome.org/SystemSettings

Cheers

By: rawsausage

rawsausage — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:48:05 +0000

What you missed in the Microsoft's MMC based control view is that the MMC add-ons are mostly network transparent. Although you normally use them against your own local computer (as from the control panel view), most of them can be pointed to do exactly the same to an other computer.

Just a hint in case you did know. MMC is some 10+ years ahead in development.

By: Loic Marteau

Loic Marteau — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 12:55:19 +0000

In fact youre right, system settings in KDE are more about User Desktop Settings.

But there is some module inside that perhaps can be considered as system modules (Samba, Kdm, Printers in kde3 and perhaps soon back in kde4). This is not very clear.

Why not rename system Settings in KDE by Desktop Settings, perhaps this will less confuse the user ?

Or let system settings and create a specific Desktop settings tab and a system settings one inside?

Without talking of where they should be, is there some module in Yast that it can be relevant to have directly in KDE upstream ?

Cheers

By: Temet

Temet — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 08:02:05 +0000

Hello, may I ask something?

Why “Personal Settings” and not “Personal settings”? Why “Default Applications” and not “Default applications”?

I mean, why all the words have an uppercase letter ? This is not correct in language grammar (at least in french) : only the first word should have the first letter uppercase?

Is it really needed to reproduce the errors of Mac or Windows to be competitive? I hope not!

For someone who likes his language, like me… it’s in fact a bug!

(yeah, sorry for my english… I’m just a french guy! )

By: Giovanni Masucci

Giovanni Masucci — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:30:57 +0000

I’m too for removing duplicates between yast and systemsettings and creating a tab in system settings called yast (or administration), if it’s technically possible to do so. If not it’s ok to keep them separate, but the most important thing is to remove confusing duplicates…

By: duncan

duncan — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 23:12:02 +0000

YaST was destroyed by Novell on ideological purpose. A remark as “The fact that it still is a Qt 3.x application, The code is not easy to port to Qt 4.x, even more difficult to change the look and feel (which would help for the feature mentioned above )” is offensive weazel reasoning.

@andre

I don’t have the energy to follow up on conspiracy theories caused by lack of information and imagination.

I have the impression you are mixing things. We are only talking here about the control center. Not YaST. YaST is user interface independent and has support for ncurses, Qt 4.x and gtk, and the Qt interface has nice styling support for the installer since 11.0.

The control center is a very small application, it is Qt 3.x based, and the comment about the difficulty for porting it or extending it is based on empiric evidence. I invite you to look at http://svn.opensuse.org/svn/yast/trunk/control-center/ , all the code is there and we are open for suggestions on how the code can be reused.

With this facts, and also with all the great feedback YaST got from the community because the improvements in the last major versions, I must say your comment “YaST was destroyed by Novell on ideological purpose” is incorrect and unfair.

By: Grósz Dániel

Grósz Dániel — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:57:15 +0000

"YaST was destroyed by Novell on ideological purpose."

What do you mean by that? What is destroyed in YaST?