GUI admin tools should provide transparency

[Andrew Piskorski]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2006 at 11:35:03PM +0100, Quim Gil wrote:
> Subject: Re: gnome terminal

> The official Ubuntu documentation keeps the user in the GUI whenever
> possible (thanks Corey to point this out). The confusion comes from
> elsewhere, every time someone sends a regular user to the command line
> for administration tasks that can be perfectly performed with (cute and
> simple) GNOME tools.

Those Gnome GUI admin tools may be "cute and simple", and they
certainly can be useful at times, but they are also TOTALLY OPAQUE!
AFAICT they provide absolutely no way to find out what the tool is
REALLY doing underneath, not for beginners and not for Unix experts
either.  Down that path lies Microsoft Windows, and I was dismayed to
find Ubuntu apparently going that route.

Is there some magic switch I can throw to have Ubuntu conveniently
show me what the cute GUI admin tools really do?  Failing that, where
DO I look to find out what they do?  What config files, scripts, or
source code actually defines the actions taken by these GUI tools?

-- 
Andrew Piskorski <atp at piskorski.com>
http://www.piskorski.com/