Code review comment for lp:~albertomilone/gnome-control-center/randr-virtual

On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 06:26:26PM +0000, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> Alberto Milone wrote:
> > On Thursday 29 January 2009 17:48:37 Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> > > Alberto Milone wrote:
> > A lot of users (see what's happening on ubuntuforums.org) will upgrade
> > to Jaunty and will be a bit shocked by this change. Most of them have
> > learnt to deal with X freezes (which are by no means infrequent) by
> > using Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. This doesn't make them "experts" though and
> > it's very likely that they are not aware of the existence of the
> > DontZap option.
>
> In that case, if we want this to be the behaviour of X in Ubuntu, we
> should leave the option ON.
>
> http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability
>
> Check out #10: placating people with options.

Heh, spot on, yes 'placating people with options' would be a pretty fair
description.

Basically the situation we face is a 'bikeshed painting debate'. It is
an easy thing to have a very strong opinion on, in proportion to its
actual importance.

The 'Ctrl-Alt-Backspace shortcut' is one of those old-timer things that
really does need to go in order to make Linux more palatable to newbie
users. Unfortunately, it's a case where it may benefit over half of our
future users to have it disabled by default, but some 10% will be quite
vocal in its defense.

In the UDS session on this, there were a couple people vocal in their
defense of the option. The compromise of providing a GUI tool of some
sort for controlling it allowed us to reach a consensus on the topic.
Admittedly though, this is definitely a case of placating the vocal
minority by providing an option.

Bryce