2013/5/28 Simon McVittie :
[...]
>
> The participants in this thread are debian-devel subscribers: the sort
> of people who know that Debian is a Unix system, know what a Unix system
> is, and have some idea of what a "btrfs scrub cron job", or indeed an
> MTA, means. That's a pretty limiting audience for an operating system.
> The Universal Operating System should also be usable by people who don't
> meet those criteria, and I think Joss is right to speak up on their behalf.
>
> I'm quite prepared to believe that *our* Unix systems - and in
> particular, servers and development machines - need an MTA, but my
> parents' laptops really shouldn't need one. Ideally, we can have a
> sensible default that is suitable for both experts and non-experts; but
> if we can't, then the non-experts should probably have priority. After
> all, the sort of people who read debian-devel know how to switch away
> from a default MTA that isn't suitable for us, but my parents don't even
> know that they *have* an MTA.
>
I agree that a lot of (if not most) non-tech people probably don't use it, I do
see some benefits to this as opposed to desktop notifications. I
believe there was
a similar discussion going on about Ubuntu update notifications a few years ago,
when they started just popping up the update-manager window. My point here
being that those e-mails are more persistent than some notification
that can easily
get lost. Or perhaps there should be a more permanent system for such
notifications.
I'm not talking about the output of the btrfs scrub, but consider
important messages
on upgrades, such as were some things break compatibility with something and the
user needs to know that. For instance as the consequence of a security fix,
something no longer works (java applet? Instant messaging application?
that sort of
thing). You don't want a volatile message that they can't review after a reboot,
maybe they haven't even seen it if they ware away from the computer.
Also the e-mail doesn't get in the way of things, your work doesn't
get interrupted
by an e-mail, whereas desktop notifications may be more intrusive.
Perhaps there is a need for more permanent desktop notifications,
besides the current one-time notifications such as "USB storage drive has
been detected". Something that persists a reboot. I don't know, I'm
just brainstorming here.
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