Karmic touch pad request

[Daniel Chen]

On Sat, Sep 26, 2009 at 6:55 PM, Aaron C. de Bruyn
<ubuntu-devel at darkpixel.com> wrote:
> button didn't work.  Tapping the pad didn't work.  I thought the
> touchpad buttons were dead.
>
> After 5 or 10 minutes, I remembered this post and realized the default setting
> for tapping is 'off'.  Lame.

It's not easy to set a good default for everyone. This decision
certainly isn't limited to "tap to click"; there are numerous other
default settings to consider (hello, PulseAudio), and a vocal minority
does not necessarily constitute _the_ correct path forward. There is a
fine line to tread between shipping the upstream default and shipping
"what users expect" - and of course there's no good way to determine
what users expect.

One metric that I use is the principle of least surprise. I also
factor in ease of toggling whatever setting is at stake. The more
technical/experienced the user, the less pressing it is to deliver a
non-default setting.

Then again, one needs to consider existing release behaviour.


[0] Ed Felten gives an excellent analogy at
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/improving-governments-user-interface