Usability Improvement

[Brian Cluff]

Thanks for pointing me to that mailing list.  I wasn't aware of it's 
existence.  I knew this probably wasn't the right place to post my 
problem and suggested answer, but I knew you were a friendly bunch 
(Scarlett Clark attends my local LUG) of people and could point in me 
the right direction.

As for my 10s of thousands of machines statement.  I used to be Tech 
Director for a large school district in Arizona (28 campuses when I 
left) and we would put an image of latest version of Kubuntu on all the 
machines twice a year as long as we didn't see any major blockages in 
the particular version (like there was with the initial switch to 
KDE4... we waited a year till version 4.3 was released :)
It was wonderful only having to have a single image that would work on 
every single machine that we would install it on.  It sure beat the "bad 
old days" when we had to have a windows image for every single kinds of 
machine... In the end it just meant the windows machines never got 
reinstalled if we could help it and were constantly infested with 
viruses and malware that the kids were purposefully install to get out 
have having to do their work... I was a very hostile environment.

Anyway, I'm hoping that I can get something done about the wallet's 
initial setup.  I found that it wasn't a huge problem for people at 
first, but their misunderstanding of what the wallet was and it almost 
always getting miss-configured for their needs would annoy them over the 
long term.  It's the kind of problem that doesn't get reported but you 
see people yelling at their computer when they get a password prompt 
that they don't think they should be getting while you are on site.

Thanks,
Brian Cluff

On 08/01/2017 10:49 AM, Valorie Zimmerman wrote:
> I'm interested that you say you have installed Kubuntu on tens of
> thousands of machines. If so, perhaps the KDE list for people who run
> large deployments would be the most suitable place to post:
>
> https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/enterprise
>
> KDE is very interested in getting large deployments as pain-free as
> possible. We in Kubuntu can be helpful at the packaging level, but not
> directly in software development or fixing bugs at that level.
>
> All the best,
>
> Valorie
>
> On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 8:53 PM, Brian Cluff <brian at snaptek.com> wrote:
>> I'm sure this isn't the most correct place to post this, but perhaps it
>> could make it's way to the correct person.
>>
>> I've put Kubuntu on 10s of thousands of machines over the years and a very
>> common problem that I run into is with the KDE wallet system.  I meant to
>> write in with this suggestion years ago, but it got out of site, out of
>> mind.  However I just did a little tech support for someone that was very
>> very angry about the situation, so I thought I should finally say something
>> (better late than never).
>>
>> So the problem is that when you first login it tells you set a password for
>> the wallet, but it doesn't really give you any of the implications of
>> setting that password so it then becomes a giant annoyance to those that
>> don't care about protecting their passwords and just want their system to
>> leave them alone.
>>
>> So my thoughts are that without changing the wallet system itself perhaps a
>> different initial setup could be created that briefly tells you what the
>> wallet does and then asks you to pick from 3 levels of security for the
>> wallet such as:
>>
>> Low security: Just store my passwords in the wallet without a password
>> Medium security: Set a password for your web passwords but keep the local
>> passwords without a password so your wifi "just works"
>> High security: Set a password for all passwords in the wallet
>>
>> Only the second and third option would prompt for a password.
>> I suppose you could have a 4th option to not use the wallet at all, but I
>> wouldn't recommend that to anyone.
>>
>> I believe that simple change would keep people not only more educated about
>> what the wallet is, but will make them happier with KDE in the long run...
>> (and keep people from yelling at me in the future <grin>)
>>
>> Thanks for reading my rant,
>> Brian Cluff
>>
>>
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>
>