Allowing passwordless login via GDM

[Jan Claeys]

On vr, 2007-02-23 at 11:37 +0100, Milan wrote:
> Hey, you guys have a geek way of thinking I didn't expected to encounter 
> on an Ubuntu mailing list ! I'm not talking about five-year-old 
> children's ability to type in a password, nor of the need of their 
> parents to control them. I'm talking of making life easier to users who 
> want to use this feature. Let's them bring up their child as they want to !

I gave the very young children as an example why a passwordless account
might be useful (even if there is an adult around, she/he might be doing
other work and preferring not to interrupt it).

> For you, typing a password each time you log in isn't an issue. But I 
> believe using the console is not neither. For a "normal" end-user, this 
> is boring.

Having to type a PIN-code before getting my money from an ATM (or having
to type it twice when using a "self-bank"!) is boring too.  Yet I
wouldn't want it to just give this money to the guy who stole my wallet.

> Moreover, this feature won't bring down security at all: you still need 
> to enter your password to use gksudo, or ssh...

There is a lot of privacy-related things that don't require a
password...

> This is only an old 
> Unix-geek reflex putting down Windows about its lacks. But this is not a 
> lack, even Windows has many! Linux power is that you can enable almost 
> all features you want/need, while they are not dangerous.

Well, it already *is* possible to do what you want, but IMHO it's just
not a good default setting, and especially not for users that have
"administrator" rights...

[...]
> The question is, do we want to discourage people from switching to
> Linux, and do we want Ubuntu to be the best distribution for home
> end-users?

I don't believe removing security measures at the same time as Microsoft
is adding them is really going to make Ubuntu the _best_ distro...


-- 
Jan Claeys