[geeks] The illusion of Windows 7

[Mike Meredith]

On Sun, 1 Nov 2009 02:17:51 +0200, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:
> I'm about to go to bed, but in a nutshell, do you know all about those
> constant prompts from Windows Vista for your admin password to do just
> about anything?
> 
> Someone ported it to Linux, and everyone has adopted it. 

Ubuntu (and the sudo method of enabling access to privileged methods)
predates Vista by over a year. If anything Vista borrowed the idea from
Ubuntu.

> BTW, the first thing I found with UBUNTU 9.10 is that it offers you a
> list of user's full names if you use the gnome display manager to

It sort of tells you that Ubuntu isn't properly embedded at any large
sites.

Q: What does a chooser-style login window look like with 40,000 user
   objects ?
A: Nobody has had the patience to find out[0]

> prompt your for an X windows login, and the usual ways of turning it
> off in the gdm.conf file no longer work. 

They've also broken the .xsession functionality. Whilst I might be
stupid enough to run Ubuntu, I _do_ want an old-fashioned window
manager.


0: Actually that's not true ... it took about 20 minutes although that
   was on a pretty slow virtual machine. Mind you it might have been a
   lot worse if I had fixed the automounter before turning off the
   chooser login window.