Language chooser at login

[Matthew Paul Thomas]

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Oliver Grawert wrote on 04/07/11 13:14:
>...
> Am Montag, den 04.07.2011, 11:11 +0100 schrieb Matthew Paul Thomas:
>...
>> GDM in Ubuntu does not let you choose the language when logging in to
>> a guest session. <http://launchpad.net/bugs/310801>
>>
>> Nor does it let you choose the language when logging in to an account
>> with no password. <http://launchpad.net/bugs/508552>
>>
>> So if those are the use cases, then GDM's language selection is
>> perfectly useless: it lets you choose a language only when you don't
>> need to.
>
> thats indeed pretty bad, so these bugs should be bumped in priority
> and get fixed then :)

It's not just a matter of bumping the priority, though. Whether it's
even practical to fix those bugs in the login screen is relevant to
whether there should be a language chooser in the login screen.

For an account with no password, the obvious solution is for the
language chooser to be visible before you select an account, not just
afterward. But the reason GDM's language chooser only appears afterward
is that it defaults to the current language for the selected account. If
it appeared before you chose an account, choosing an account would
change the setting in the language chooser to match, unless you had
already customized it. Hopefully few people would fall into the trap of
thinking that they always needed to choose their language first.

For a guest session, I can think of two ways to solve the problem: an
interstitial dialog for the "Guest Session" command, that lets you
choose a language before entering the session (as Robert Ancell
suggested); and on-the-fly language switching inside the session. A
language chooser in the login screen wouldn't help either of those.

I don't think an interstitial dialog would need to be as "hackish" as
you suggested. It could simultaneously serve other purposes, such as (a)
briefly explaining what the guest session is, (b) warning that files
saved locally in the session will be deleted on logout
<http://launchpad.net/bugs/435930>, and (c) acting as a confirmation
step in case you slipped while choosing "Lock Screen". And the language
of the dialog itself could update as you change the language inside it,
just as Ubiquity does. What do you think?

>...
>>> why not drop it from the control center then ? keep the
>>> configuration at the login screen and move langpack installation
>>> into software center where it belongs ?
>>
>> Even if it was true that language pack installation "belongs" in USC
>> (which it isn't), that would be irrelevant. Imagine a computer on
>> which every language pack is installed. People would still need to
>> switch from one language to another.
>>
> well, i could imagine a "languages" category in USC ... just seems
> logical to me to put it there.
>...

That Ubuntu translations are implemented as installable software
packages is an implementation detail. In other OSes, they aren't.

(The same is true for themes and fonts. I'd love to see a standalone
font catalog, for example; it could be much better than USC's "Fonts"
category ever will be.)

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mpt
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