shutdown compared ubuntu vs fedora

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

Valent Turkovic wrote:
> On 5/21/07, Steffen Kluge <kluge at fujitsu.com.au> wrote:
>> On Fri, 2007-05-18 at 12:05 +0200, Valent Turkovic wrote:
>> > You should look
>> > more towards the OSX than to unix in these matters.
>>
>> Good idea. Sleep/Restart/Shutdown are separate from Logout in Mac OS X.
>>
>> Cheers
>> Steffen.
> 
> Come on Steffen, it is too easy to make a point when you take things
> out of context... i was speaking about apple in much wider terms, not
> to copy how they did this one thing.
> 
> Logically Sleep/Restart/Shutdown and logout fit together.
> 

Come on, just like start -> shutdown -> logoff -> confirm?

It looks to me you suggested earlier that I'm new to this world but 
desktop studies have shown that what is most important to users is that 
they can intuitively 'control' or 'use' the operating system -that 
includes that all software is there so when you insert a DVD it plays 
it, and when you connect a printer; you can print-. Anyway, back to my 
point.

I don't know how eye-candy in the shut down dialog improves user 
experience in a way that makes shutting down a machine more intuitive. 
Now, if you're seriously considering an alteration to the shut down 
dialog, I suggest you put that idea upstream, because we are in-line 
with them. And so we should, because derivations gets you 
distro-specific desktops which won't make anyone any happier.

In addition -this is just my personal opinion-, why do we even have a 
dialog? Didn't I just click 'Shut Down'? The machine should thus shut 
down, not ask me another question. Luckily, there is a default timeout, 
so the machine shuts down without user input after all. Now this is 
something I'd rather see different. *But I know why it's there* and I 
admit that for the general desktop user -not for me personally- it's an 
improvement.

You could do the same, considering that you would like to see things 
different, but you know that when keeping in-line with upstream will 
improve upstream -and thus FOSS; even Ubuntu- if you put some effort 
where your mouth is, rather then complaining that derivate X looks 
better to you then in-line Y. IMHO there's no such thing as 'Do it 
different in Fedora' as far as upstream software is concerned -it breaks 
with upstream, we depend on them-. If we want things different, code 
flows into upstream source repositories.

I'm sure there'll be more eye-candy in GNOME/KDE tomorrow, and even more 
the day after... If only we work with them, not derive from them. I bet 
this entire 'What should the shut down dialog look like?' discussion has 
already taken place, someone or some group has decided what to do and 
you're questioning them by saying it could improve the intuitiveness by 
looking different from what it looks now because the most derivative of 
distributions has changed the looks and you like it.

You feel me?

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen
-kanarip